MEMOIR: "What to Look for in Winter," by Candia McWilliam

After a half-century of savage wounds, some self-inflicted, Candia McWilliam noticed her eyelids revolting, refusing to stay up, as if her eyes no longer wished to view her world.

Doctors called it blepharospasm, a rare disorder in which vision remains perfect but locked behind those listless lids. "In order to gain sight," she writes, "I grimace, stretch, peer and above all hold taut and high my already rather camel-like head with the result that I look, if I do go out, like the caricature of a snob."

Some docs wondered if her ailment were psychological, a subconscious choice. A lover of books, of rooms with views, of the faces of her children, the UK novelist wondered if her new darkness had some point.

She realized she needed to force herself to see her life anew.

Thus was born this astonishing memoir -- sprawling, riveting, out-of-control, heartbreaking, hilarious and at times so vivid and captivating that, yes, you might wish you had stood in McWilliam's shoes.

She is 6 feet tall, an only child whose mother killed herself in her daughter's bed when the girl was 9 years old. Candia left home young, borrowing another family to take haven from her father's indifference. Her two marriages ended, the first to an earl, the second to a don at Oxford whom she left, to her nagging regret. She raised three children, while drinking herself into remorse and rehab. She wrote, then could not write. She hated herself. She grew fat and reclusive and, then, blind.

But her mind's eye is exquisite. She details her childhood, the scents and scenes of Scotland, with a watchmaker's care. Later, a remote island in the Hebrides gives her comfort; it, too, becomes so appealing that I find it in my atlas and vow to visit. Much of the memoir is dictated to a stenographer but much is typed with one hand while she holds up her eyelids with the other hand's thumb and pinkie.

The author describes, in fact, a friend who hoped for a clear moral from the memoir, "a message that can be extracted from the thousands of bottles":

"She has as much chance of finding one as I have of returning to their stems the hundreds of cut daisies that lie now among the lines of clippings on the scented close-mown lawn under my window."

In the end the story is also beautiful, surprising and wise, and why not? She is a smart, sober woman seeking meaning. She also taught me scores of words, from juddered to woad, from chuffed to bedizen.

In the end, a hopeful McWilliam undergoes an operation to transplant tendons from behind her knees to her eye sockets. I will not disclose "the ending" because it certainly is not the end. Candia McWilliam leaves us, however, with a thunderous litany of why she will continue to write, and it's easy to believe every word.