In 2019, Andrew Leland began writing a book about blindness, even as he continued to blind himself.
Working while his eyesight was deteriorating gave him an insider’s perspective — who better to write about the blind than the blind? — but, as he learned, he also made writing and reporting the book a test.
He would take notes with ballpoint pens during interviews so that he could more easily see what he was writing; later, he used a six-button Braille display, an electronic note-taking tool that he is still learning. “When I downloaded my notes to my computer,” he recalls, “it was like I had a bottle of scotch before I wrote them.”
At first, he thought his experience made for the perfect story arc: He would start the book sighted, and finish it when he was blind. But that plan didn’t last long. How would Leland know when he Really blind?
As he says in the book, only about 15 percent of the blind have no light perception at all; most see something, like Leland, whose peripheral vision is now less than 6 percent of a full visual field. If he waited until he was completely blind, he thought, he might be 80, “still hanging on to eight photons of sight, saying, ‘Well, I can’t write this yet.'”
Leland plowed ahead and completed his book, “The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight,” in three years. Out July 18 from Penguin Press, the book blends memoir and reportage with fascinating take-downs on everything from the development of Braille to the history of the blind civil rights movement. James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges and Henri Matisse also worked.
The memoir tackles many questions, chief among them: What does it mean to be blind in a world that often defines blindness as the worst thing that can happen?
“Blindness manifests itself at first as this inevitable catastrophe, that all the things you loved have now been taken from you, and there’s no way to get them back,” Leland said. “The reality is, they are not lost. You just have to find a way.”
Leland was in middle school when he realized he could barely see at night. In college, a doctor told him he had retinitis pigmentosa, an incurable disease, and that he could expect to have decent daytime vision until his 30s, but by the time he was in middle age, his peripheral vision would will quickly be crushed until all he can see is a small area in front of him.
In 2009, when Leland was working as an editor at The Believer, a literary magazine based in San Francisco, he met Lily Gurton-Wachter, then a doctoral candidate in comparative literature. The two fell in love. When Leland proposed to her, she jokingly asked, “You do remember that I go blind, right?”
Gurton-Wachter, now a professor of literature at Smith College, plays an important role in Leland’s memoir, as does their son Oscar, now 10. He appears in many of the book’s best scenes, including the one where a boorish guest at a dinner party. — a father whom Leland describes as “looking like an LL Bean model” — begins asking a series of invasive questions about how Leland feels about being blind. Afterwards, he asked Gurton-Wachter what it was like to have a wife who lost his sight.
Gurton-Wachter remembers the interaction as “very awkward,” she said, and a sign that “we’re not going to hang out with those guys again.”
But for Leland, the scene, with its mindless brutality, loomed larger — something Gurton-Wachter realized when she read the book.
The chasm between how blind and sighted people often understand things is a central theme of the book. Much of the drama centers on how Leland and Gurton-Wachter come to a deeper understanding of what it means to be blind, and how others view blindness — or choose not to.
In another scene, a youth leader reads a poem by Billy Collins at a Rosh Hashana service. Leland, his family and his friends listen to the poem and its refrain — “kneel down and thank God in your sight”— in uncomfortable silence. Later, Gurton-Wachter emailed the rabbi, suggesting that a more inclusive poem might be a better option in the future.
“Years ago, if I’d heard that poem, I might not have thought it was a great poem, but I wouldn’t have really understood its issues of competence,” he says, using a term that broadly refers to behavior, speech, norms or laws that demean or devalue people with disabilities.
“But now, I see the way we use metaphors of sight and blindness in everyday speech, in TV shows or movies,” he said. “It’s everywhere.”
The book also follows Leland as he visits blind artists, engineers, and activists, including Emilie Louise Gossiaux, an award-winning sculptor and painter who lost her sight in 2010, and Erin Lauridsen, the technology director with access to one of the most popular in the country. state-of-the-art blindness rehabilitation centers.
At one point, Leland traveled to the Colorado Center for the Blind for two weeks of training. Students there take philosophy and woodworking classes, learn to kayak and rock climb, hone their cooking and kitchen skills, and navigate the area, all while wearing sleep shades (really, heavy-duty sleep mask) that completely blocks their vision.
The idea, says Julie Deden, the center’s director, is to build confidence and independence. “It’s very liberating when they discover they can do all those things without any vision,” he said.
Leland found the training transformative. “Just sitting in a room wearing sleep shades, hanging out with other blind people wearing sleep shades, there’s just a sense of complete normalcy and camaraderie and joy,” he said.
Leland also answers questions about being blind that many of us may not ask, or may not know who to ask. Like: Can blind people be racist, because they can’t “see” color? (Yes.) Do blind people want to know if the woman they are talking to is beautiful? (Some do.) Why do blind people like to dress up? (Because they are human.)
Over the years, Leland worked to improve his proficiency with technology such as screen readers, software programs that allow visually impaired users to read text on a computer screen. She made the decision after a blind woman told her that she should learn now, instead of when she loses her sight, an experience that for many can be an emotional whirlwind.
“I’ve heard stories of people losing months, but I’ve also heard stories of people losing five or 10 years,” he said. “That’s not the time you want to try to memorize keyboard shortcuts.”
Most of the book was written during the pandemic lockdown. The writing process, he said, kept him going despite his failing eyesight and accompanying worries about the future. The book, after all, is about blindness, so everything is hard for the mill: the struggles and heartbreaks, as well as the companionship and connection that comes from being around other blind people.
“If I was just working in a job where no one cared about what I was going through and it was purely hindering my progress, it would be very difficult,” he said. But because of the fact that he was writing about blindness, “the loss of sight was almost productive. I was like, Oh, this stinks, but then again, great. I can carefully observe this process and write about it, and I’m getting my work done.”
