In 2011, I ordered an I.D. cane, used less for tapping around than to signal to the world that its bearer might not see well. It folded up, and mostly I hid it in my bag. But, after running into fire hydrants and hip-checking a toddler in a café, I began using it full time. Reading became difficult: the white of the page took on a wince-inducing glare, and the words frosted over, like the lowermost lines on the optometrist’s eye chart. It was only once I’d reached this stage that my diagnosis started to feel real. I frantically wondered whether I should use my last years to, say, visit Japan, or plow through the Criterion Collection, instead of spending my evenings watching “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” with Lily. One night, I lay awake in bed. I knew that, if Lily were awake, she’d be able to see the blankets, the window, the door, but, when I scanned the room, I saw nothing, just the flashers and floaters that oscillated in my eyes. Is this what it will be like? I wondered, casting my gaze around like a dead flashlight. I felt like I’d been buried alive.
In 2020, I heard about a residential training school called the Colorado Center for the Blind, in Littleton. The C.C.B. is part of the National Federation of the Blind, and is staffed almost entirely by blind people. Students live there for several months, wearing eye-covering shades and learning to navigate the world without sight. The N.F.B. takes a radical approach to cultivating blind independence. Students use power saws in a woodshop, take white-water-rafting trips, and go skiing. To graduate, they have to produce professional documents and cook a meal for sixty people. The most notorious test is the “independent drop”: a student is driven in circles, and then dropped off at a mystery location in Denver, without a smartphone. (Sometimes, advanced students are left in the middle of a park, or the upper level of a parking garage.) Then the student has to find her way back to the Colorado Center, and she is allowed to ask one person one question along the way. A member of an R.P. support group told me, “People come back from those programs loaded for bear”—ready to hunt the big game of blindness. Katie Carmack, a social worker with R.P., told me, of her time there, “It was an epiphany.” That fall, I signed up.
Travelers are drawn to Antarctica for what they can find there—the wildlife, the scenery, the sense of adventure—and for what they can’t: cars, buildings, cell towers. They talk about the overwhelming silence. The Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge called it “the quietest place I have ever been.”
All of these attractions are getting harder to find in the rest of the world. They’re disappearing in Antarctica too. The continent is melting; whole chunks are prematurely tumbling into the ocean. And more people than ever are in Antarctica because tourism is on a tear.
The delicate balance of making a living and making art—living, in other words, within physical constraints while trying, meanwhile, to make room for the spontaneity needed for true expression—is the subject of Levy’s recent work, which includes a trilogy of memoirs—Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013), The Cost of Living (2018), and Real Estate (2021)—detailing her coming of age as a writer, her life as a mother, her divorce, and her attempt to fund a room of her own. These books are the latest in her decades-long exploration of form, beginning with playwriting and fiction and detouring into poetry. She’s traveled widely, and her current style and themes feel like the result of accretion, with flourishes picked up here and there. In August Blue, the characters have the gauzy abstractness of a poem speaker while the scenes themselves have the schematic tautness of a play.
Etter expertly diverts the novel from neat or didactic tropes. While Cassie does resist the powers that be in small ways — attending a rent protest, refusing to wear company swag — she mainly continues to live with her two selves, until an unforgettable ending. The upheaval of the book is largely internal, but no less moving. Through Cassie’s personal history and relationships — with her parents, with the chef, with her pseudo-friends in San Francisco — Etter accomplishes what we seek in fiction: a deeply human connection.
This is a story of a young woman and the pocket of stale air that separates her from the world and from herself, the static between authenticity and performance, fantasy and reality. Some might find the plot’s relentless dissociation a decelerator, but I found it brave and effective: Flattery remains so loyal to the physics of her character’s struggles, to the struggle of storytelling itself, that she is willing to risk allowing the less committed reader to wander off.
This book is a tour of how the science of processing has allowed companies to produce goods that are no longer even faint echoes of the real food of which they are copies, and of what the evidence shows about the biology and psychology of eating in today’s world. Van Tulleken is at his best when using his own scientific expertise to help readers through otherwise unnavigable science, data and history, explaining with precision what we are actually eating.
One anecdote in Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You captures the essence of Lucinda Williams, the acclaimed American singer-songwriter. In 1993, Williams won a Grammy award for her song “Passionate Kisses,” but although she appreciated the recognition and was gratified that her music had reached a wider audience, the prospect of attending the award ceremony in New York City filled her with such anxiety and terror that she didn’t go.
“The truth is,” Williams writes, with the candor found throughout her memoir, “that I was not just self-conscious but also scared. I feared that I didn’t belong.” Williams was 41 years old at the time. Now in her early seventies, recognized as an icon of rock, folk, and country music, this fear doesn’t arise as regularly as it once did.