Girl in the Dark (26 page)

How do you write about having to live entirely in the dark? When I started in August 2010, well into my fourth extended period of total black, the result was not encouraging, reading, in broad terms, something like this:

Even I, a novice, realised that as literature it lacked a certain vim.

Clearly I had to abandon the chronological approach—but what could I do instead? In the end, I wrote short sections, each focused on a different aspect of my dark life. So
Part One
draws on incidents from different periods that I spent in the black. In this state, time alters itself, becomes amorphous rather than linear;
you lose track of how long you’ve been in it, and you do not know if, this time, it will be for ever, or if or when you will ever get out.

In
Part Two
, the darkness begins to recede, but in a way that is partial and always temporary. I did not want to bore everybody by describing each of my slow climbs back towards the light. So I made a selection of the most significant and memorable steps.

For people interested in the actual order of events—maddening and frustrating as it was—I have included a diagram in the Appendix.

Many people have generously allowed me to write about them. Names and some details have been changed in order to protect privacy. I have taken the liberty of reconstructing conversations, to give a more complete sense of my experience, based on what I can remember regarding the sort of thing that was said. I did not know (thank goodness) what my future held, so I did not take contemporaneous notes.

“What are you doing, darling? What’s all this scrawl?”

“I’m trying to think of a way to set out all the ups and downs of my illness, without it getting completely boring and confusing.”

“What you need,” Pete says, “is a graph.”

“A graph?”

“Yes. You’ve got two main variables—time and light sensitivity—and you plot one against the other.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, you put time as the abscissa—”

“The
what
?”

“The abscissa.” He draws lines on my notebook. “And light tolerance as the ordinate.”

“Do you mean the x coordinate and the y coordinate?”

“Yes—those are the mathematical names.”

“Goodness,” I say, getting excited, “I’ve never heard the word ‘abscissa.’ ”

Pete is the only person I know who, though completely unpretentious and unassuming, will periodically use, in the course of everyday conversation, a word that is
entirely new to me,
and then stomp about insisting that he does not know what the fuss is about, and that whatever it is is a “perfectly normal word.” I must confess I find this rather erotic.

So I plot time along the x-axis, and light tolerance along the y-axis, stack the different years on top of each other so the graph is not too long and thin, and the result is:

Fig. 1: Variation of light tolerance over time in one highly photosensitive female

Nina Milton made helpful and encouraging comments on the first draft. My mother read the next and gave it to her friend Babette, who gave it to her friend Anna Goodall, who passed it to Jane Finigan at Lutyens and Rubinstein. Jane wrote me a wonderful letter that stimulated me to expand it to the size of a proper book, and Jane is now my agent.

I would also like to thank Anna Steadman and Juliet Mahony at Lutyens and Rubinstein, David Forrer at Inkwell Management, Helen Garnons-Williams, Elizabeth Woabank and their team at Bloomsbury, and Bill Thomas, Kristine Puopolo and their team at Doubleday. Helen and Kristine formed a sensitive and rigorous editorial double act.

Eve, Lynda, Debbie, Dee, Jo and Ms. Edwards all typed various parts at various times, interpreting my curly handwriting and endless scrawled amendments.
My friends, family and telephone friends visited me, phoned me, wrote to me, made me laugh and kept me sane. My dear husband gave me more than words can possibly express.

Anna Lyndsey worked for several years in London as a civil servant until she became ill. She now lives with her husband in Hampshire. Anna is writing under a pen name.