Told with great beauty, humour and honesty, Girl in the Dark is the astonishing and uplifting account of Anna’s descent into the depths of her extraordinary illness. During the worst, she must spend months in a darkened room, listening to audiobooks, inventing word-games and fighting to keep despair at bay. Now her extreme sensitivity to light in all forms means she must spend much of her life in total darkness.ĭuring the best times, she can venture cautiously outside at dusk and dawn, avoiding high-strength streetlamps. Then the burning spread and the problematic light sources proliferated.
It began with a burning sensation on her face when she was exposed to computer screens and fluorescent lighting. She enjoyed her job she was ambitious she was falling in love. My body lies boxed in darkness, but beneath my closed eyelids there is colour, sound and movement, in glorious contrast to the day mad movies projected nightly in the private theatre of my skull.’Īnna Lyndsey was living a normal life.
In my dreams I travel on trains and climb mountains, I play concerts and swim rivers, I carry important documents on vital missions, I attend meetings which become song-and-dance routines. It’s a little masterpiece' Mail on Sunday It isn’t a misery memoir, nor a self-help guide. 'The miracle is not that she has written about the experience, although that would be remarkable enough … What is so surprising is that this is a tremendous book, beautifully written and full of hard-won hope and unexpected humour. 'An astonishing memoir' Sonali Deraniyagala, author of Wave She is forced to spend her life in darkness. It isn’t a misery memoir, nor a self-help guide.Anna Lyndsey suffers from extreme sensitivity to light.
Praise for Girl in the Dark ‘The miracle is not that she has written about the experience, although that would be remarkable enough … What is so surprising is that this is a tremendous book, beautifully written and full of hard-won hope and unexpected humour. I still remember the first words I wrote: “The girl in the dark is just like you or me, except she has to wear a house.” I was writing primarily to distract myself from despair and stop my head exploding from boredom, but looking back, I think I was also trying to humanise people with chronic illnesses, especially those which are so easily dismissed because they seem extreme or impossible, and because, in our current state of knowledge, they are not yet fully understood. It took me years to work out that I could write in my blacked-out room – I started what became Girl in the Dark in August 2010 and it was published by Bloomsbury in 2015. I worked for several years as a civil servant in Whitehall until I became ill in the summer of 2005.
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