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
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
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
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 […]