Nicole Kear's 'Now I See You' recounts journey of going blind
When author Nicole Kear decided to join the circus, do an off-Broadway play and fall in love, she often hid her oncoming blindness.
She'd been diagnosed as a young woman with a retinal disease that had no cure and no treatment.
From her piece in the New York Times:
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My field of vision has gradually shrunk from the normal 180-degree span most people have down to 30 degrees, and then to 10, leaving me looking out of peepholes. What this means is I don't see things coming. Even stationary things like, say, sofas.
My daily life is a collision course, filled with little obstacles. There are the obstacles too low to enter my central vision, like the dishwasher door left open by my husband, which felt like a crowbar on my shinbone and caused me to spew such vile expletives that my husband was scared off the dishwasher for weeks.
There are the obstacles too high to enter my central vision, like the cabinet doors left ajar that, over the years, have socked me in the lip, the eye and the forehead. The evidence of one particularly nasty encounter -- blood stains from an accidental blow that very nearly broke my nose -- is still on my pea-green area rug.
What she had was some time before the blindness fully set in, and what she did with that time is at the heart of her memoir, "Now I See You."
Kear joins The Daily Circuit to discuss her new book.
Excerpt: "Now I See You"