Girl In The Dark: A Memoir (2000) I am a catastrophic thinker. I blame the media. Not always but more often than not, I have given serious consideration to whether heartburn might actually be a heart attack, calf pain a DVT. Knowing this about myself, I tend to avoid books like Brain on Fire or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly because, well, I'm afraid to read them. How I'm always picking up books without realizing their content is beyond me but in the case of Girl In The Dark, I'm so glad I made this impulse grab at the library yesterday because this book spoke to me in many ways. Written in lyrically beautiful prose, this is both tragedy and love story. The writing is painfully honest, at times funny, always precise and lovely and real. The reader gets a true sense of how a sudden, chronic, debilitating illness can level a person at the knees and steal all vestiges of their previous life. One point I thought was very well-made was that in instances like these, all bets are off...those you expect to be there may not be able to handle the circumstances and none of us know what we would do in another person's circumstances. The fact that this woman wrote this book literally in the dark is not lost on me either. Candid about her moments of boredom and despair, she discusses it all without self-pity. I could not hold back the tears when I saw her graph in the Author's Note demonstrating how much of each year she spent isolated. Clearly already in possession of tremendous strength, character and a great love in her life, I wish her simply happiness and peace and I hope one day she can come back into the light. 4 stars. A beautifully written account of a life in the dark that most of us would find unimaginable; skin breaking out in an excruciating rash when exposed to any light, and the extreme lengths Lyndsey has to go through to make her life as comfortable as possible. Although beautifully written, it isn't perfect, and is written in the present tense, which is fine in fiction, but slightly jarring for a memoir. It also incorrectly refers to Bipolar disorder as Bipolar disease.