5/13/2023 0 Comments Girl in the Dark by Anna Lyndsey![]() ![]() ![]() This is not the kind of book people generally set out to buy. As the allergy got worse, “I learnt that walls were what I had to wear, that there was no alternative to walls, that walls, from this point on, would be my perpetual outer garment, my solitary fashion statement, my signature look.” This book is like notes from her journal of nine years spent in darkness. In her early thirties, she developed her condition. In her life before, Anna Lyndsey (a pseudonym) worked as a civil servant in London. Halfway through, the chilling realisation dawns upon me: this is a memoir. If it does, her skin begins to burn like someone is “holding a flame-thrower to my head”. No light can spill in – not a flicker, not a wink. The girl in the dark lives in this blacked out room in an unlit house.Ī few pages later comes the diagnosis: photosensitive seborrheic dermatitis, a sensitivity to light so severe that she must spend all her time in the shadows. It is extraordinarily difficult to black out a room – she uses blackout material, cooking foil for the edges and layers of tape. ![]() It begins with a woman taping up a curtained window. So when this book with a smooth black cover landed up on my desk, I figured it was a novel: horror, a psychological thriller? Plunging headlong into a book you know nothing about can be immensely satisfying. Pages: 256 A memoir about living in darkness, literally – accounts of a woman who is allergic to light. ![]()
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