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Revision as of 13:32, 30 September 2011
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{{infobox
|title=What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness
|author=Candia McWilliam
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When you know that a biography tackles alcoholism, a mother's early death, feelings of loneliness and worthlessness, culminating in going blind, you expect that this is going to be one of two types of book – the misery memoirememoir, or the positive 'all ends well' tale. ''What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness'' is neither. It is a book which is as complex as the life it relates, and as deep.
Candia McWilliam is an accomplished writer so while this biography is full of incident and pain, it is more than that – it is a fascinating piece of art in itself. McWilliam does not plough through the details of her life in rigid chronological fashion, springing life surprises on us along the way. She weaves a complicated web of now and then, of moments from past and present so that from the beginning we realise the complexity of the motives and issues that drove her to alcoholism, and even perhaps to her own blindness.
For the variety of her life and contacts with writers and artist, the recreation of family life on the Scottish island of Colonsay or in Edinburgh, the twists and turns of her two marriages and relations with her children are all suffused by an intelligent, well informed and, most importantly, fundamentally literary mind grappling with these issues. The books which have been her life are also the lens through which she tries in her darkness to understand what and why, how it came to be like this, and how to adjust. And that is the enduring significance and beauty of the book, not the solutions but the stature of the search for understanding.
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