Things No Longer There: A Memoir of Losing Sight and Finding Vision

    Things No Longer There is a lovingly crafted collection of personal stories about the author's struggle toward enlightenment while losing her eyesight. It is also, more broadly, about invisible landscapes—places of the heart that linger long after they have disappeared from the world outside. In these ten brief tales and one novella-length intimate drama, Susan Krieger takes us on a series of adventures in vision, a journey both inward and to various parts of the country. We travel with her as she goes birdwatching before sunrise in the New Mexico desert, learns to walk with a white cane, revisits an old love, returns to a summer camp of her youth, and reflects on the nature of blindness and sight.
    Krieger's touching memoir explores the ways that outer landscapes may change and sight may be lost, but inner visions persist, giving meaning, jarring the senses with a very different picture than what appears before the eyes. This book will reward both the general reader and those interested in disability studies, feminist ethnography, and lesbian studies.

Krieger (feminist studies, Stanford U.) follows in the long tradition of writing a memoir while going blind for the edification of those who are not. As she gives a detailed description of her symptoms and how they relate to her division of the world into the "outer" and the "inner," she finds that those people and places in the "outer world" to whom she has returned for one last look have for some reason changed in spite of her need for them to remain the way she remembered them long ago. Like many who will remain intensely visual throughout the progression of blindness, Krieger adopts the long-standing notion that blindness imposes a special "inner vision" that will enlighten her for the rest of her life. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Susan Krieger, a sociologist and writer, teaches in the Program in Feminist Studies at Stanford University. Her previous books include The Family Silver: Essays on Relationships among Women; Social Science and the Self: Personal Essays on an Art Form; and The Mirror Dance: Identity in a Women’s Community.