Candia Mc William had just joined the judging panel of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2006 when she started to lose her sight. The gradual onset of blindness seemed like an assault especially tailored for someone whose life consisted of reading & writing. The necessity to look inwards that followed took her on an even more painful personal journey through a waste of snows punctuated by shards of ice as she attempted to write her life back into human shape.
At first she could only dictate, & the unfamiliar process unblocked a flow of memory & association concerning her childhood in Edinburgh, her mother's suicide, her teenage escape into another identity, finding & losing bearings in Cambridge & London, her marriages, her children &, stalking all these, her increasing alcoholism. In What To Look For In Winter, we see her rifling through her many selves for that elusive thing, a sense of self, as all the time she searches the wilder shores of medicine for a cure for her blindness.
This is a writer's book, fascinated by the process & wellsprings of writing. While love & loss are at its centre, it also celebrates friendship, reading, love of children & the consolations of landscape, particularly that of Colonsay, the Hebridean island where, after three years in the dark, & thanks to an unexpected message from a wise & sympathetic reader, she begins to face up to how, falteringly, she might come to see once