Anna Lyndsey – Cannonball Read 17

“…a duty, out of sheer cussedness, not to disappear completely, simply to ease the conscience of the rest.”

Girl in the Dark by Anna Lyndsey

April 13, 2019 by Blingle Bells 1 Comment

I thought this was going to be a depressing read that I trudged through because it was short and I sometimes feel obligated to bear witness to others’ pain. That was not at all the case. This book is gorgeous. It’s poetic and absolutely beautiful. There’s a recurring metaphor for suicidal thoughts that it just incredible. It’s funny and sad and really, really, really beautiful. It wasn’t that I didn’t think someone with a debilitating illness (in Lyndsey’s case, she has an extreme sensitivity to […]

I believe the woman behind the case study, but she’s not unimpeachable

Girl in the Dark by Anna Lyndsey

February 12, 2019 by alwaysanswerb Leave a Comment

What an interesting book this is, and what a challenge to review, given how I came away from it. Anna Lyndsey’s story is that after decades of normal living, she slowly becomes so sensitive to light — both natural and artificial — that she ends up confined to a completely blacked-out room in the home she shares with her husband. Girl in the Dark focuses mostly on her declining health and the time that she spent at her lowest, while she lived in complete darkness […]

Life Without Light

September 7, 2017 by Caitlin_D Leave a Comment

Anna Lyndsey was a perfectly normal woman living in England; her face got a bit irritated after staring at a computer all day under fluorescent lights but she was managing. She left her job and moved in with her sympathetic boyfriend, Pete, hoping her situation was temporary. Unfortunately her light sensitivity only got worse and her condition made it difficult to get to doctors who might know how to help her. She slowly began barricading herself inside and resigning herself to a fate worse than […]

Light is the smiling blue-eyed daughter of a family of ruffians

October 30, 2016 by borisanne Leave a Comment

Girl in the Dark is an incredibly unique memoir that took me totally by surprise and made my jaw drop just the slightest bit as I read. Anna Lyndsey, a real human woman living in England (but writing under a pseudonym), cannot be exposed to light. Any light. Any light, not just that can be seen by the human eye, but any light at all. Her skin burns, and the pain she experiences is paralyzing. She has essentially been kidnapped by her own body’s condition, […]

Hello Darkness My Old Friend

January 7, 2016 by expandingbookshelf 1 Comment

Anna Lyndsey lives in the darkness. Although she was once an average person with a job, a boyfriend and a new apartment, in 2005 her skin began to feel like it was burning while she sat in front of the computer. At first she just rigged a fan to her desk. The fan didn’t help. She just got worse, and soon the condition spread and all forms of light affected her entire body. She ended up confined to her bedroom, covering the cracks in the […]

A Life Without Light

June 26, 2015 by badkittyuno Leave a Comment

File this one under, “Be grateful for what you have”. Anna Lyndsey’s memoir about her sensitivity to light, which has resulted in her near-constant need to remain in the dark, is beautifully written, and alternates between darkly humorous, and downright tragic. “Most of the time, I do not want to die. But I would like to have the means of death within my grasp. I want to feel the luxury of choice, to know the answer to “How do I bear this?” need not always […]

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