I am an alcoholic.

There is nothing wrong with my eyes.

I am blind.

I cannot lose my temper though I am being helped to, as you see above.

I exude marriedness and I am alone.

This book is, among very many other things, an attempt to find that temper in order that I may lose it, and in losing it, perhaps, find my lost eyes.

LENS I: Chapter 1

I have conducted my conscious life for as long as I can remember by suppression, and so this is, or threatens to be, the sort of book which I am not temperamentally suited to write, an account of a life lived, not transmuted into fiction. For me the fiction had carried the deep truths behind which I had felt able to retire, and to carry on weaving it.

Some writers, from Henry Green to Hilary Mantel, can manage this poetically veracious memoir-writing naturally. I read the best of them with pleasure and fascination. They illuminate without glare and delineate privacy without harming it. The memoirs I shrink from are accounts of profitable suffering; no, profitable accounts of suffering.

I can’t imagine that this book will be profitable in a pecuniary sense. Yet I know that any suffering in my life—‘suffering’ may be too extreme, too official, too martial, above all too tragic a word for whatever has happened to me, though maybe not for what I have brought about — might be of some use to someone. I am porous to the pain of others, but just of late have got stuck. I am fogged up. Here’s why.

It has been brewing since I was five, I know it now. I found that the way to distance oneself from discomfort was to trap it in not spoken but written words, and that, similarly, the way to hold fast to the good was to try — much less easy — to do the same. I was greatly helped in my project by being a fat child. I was good at sitting still because I wasn’t any good at moving. It was my good fortune to have two parents who never stopped making marks on paper and the richest part of whose lives were led in her imagination in one case and his intellect in the other. I copied them.

Why start on this now? In 2006, anxious about money and aware that I was about to start out aged fifty on a life alone, in Oxford, a city in which I had taken twenty years not to feel at home, I accepted an invitation to become a judge of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction. I was a sedulous, note-taking, reader of contemporary fiction as well as a lot of other stuff, and I thought I might as well harness my habit. I liked either the actuality of or the sound of the other judges. I wasn’t wrong to.

The entire process of judging fiction is difficult to defend or articulate and painful even — especially? — for any ‘winner’ of tender conscience but, insofar as it is possible, we remained pure. Early on, the Chair of the judges’ committee had given me a fine piece of advice: ‘If you fall in love with one book you will be setting yourself up for heartbreak,’ she said. I took prophylactic measures, and fell in love with three or four.

After the first judges’ meeting, which took place in the solid surroundings of the Athenaeum, I went to visit a friend with whom I had been at school after I was sent away from home in Scotland. We have known one another since we were twelve. ‘What is wrong with your face?’ she asked, and offered to balance teabags on my eyes, which did indeed feel wonky, despite the soothing light of a grey spring day in St James’s Square. My eyes juddered in their sockets as though they were coming loose and they were hot and couldn’t settle unless I told them to. So the implicit pact between intellect and eyes, eyes and reading heart, had to be declared and had already begun to involve willpower instead of consolation and ease.

I had noticed that I was having difficulty holding the gaze of anyone who was talking to me, but had, characteristically, ascribed this to even more reading than usual and an unadmitted struggle with sleeping, especially through the hours between two and four in the morning, the time when suicide suggests itself and addicts give in.

I kept on reading, of course. Twice, I visited GPs, who each prescribed eye drops. I was aware that I couldn’t deal as well with people as I had been used to, because I couldn’t hold their gaze. I wondered if this was a late-onset affectation, like a fake stammer to imply an engaging tentativeness. But I couldn’t employ my will over my eyes, couldn’t respond or beam or seek or console as I had always — I realised — been used to doing.

My stint as secretary of one of the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings came to an end and I was relieved, as I had relied upon my intensity of gaze, my peripheral vision and my attunedness in order to intuit who needed to speak when and for how long.

From my father I have inherited the characteristic that I am irresistible to panhandlers. University towns are rich in such people and I have all my life felt that I am one. There’s no gap to mind. Most of the beggars in Oxford know my name, or a version of it. My chief heckling bridesmaid at the time was a rather cross, sometimes violent, highly intelligent alcoholic, named Man. By the cashpoint one day he said, ‘Ere, Candice, what is wrong with your eyes?’

I visited an ophthalmologist who laughed handsomely at the amount of reading I reported myself as doing. I found that odd, in Oxford. I doubt that I was reading as much as, for example, many dons, or my neighbour the Reverend Professor Sir Henry Chadwick, whose elegant figure might be seen daily as he got into the car on the way to the library in order to set about the Early Church with grace and vigour; and he, after all, was rising to the challenge of manuscript with eyes that had been working for all but a half century longer than my own.

I was reading those soft options, novels, printed (one might have thought) in typefaces congenial to the eye, faces confected to encourage and reward the process of reading.

I got more drops.

I took seventy or so books home to the Hebrides, where part of me had been a child. I rented a wee cottage down the drive from my adopted family, so that I might work. My family visited on a generously formal basis. There were painful family events occurring, than which any passing funny business with my eyes was far less harrowing. Also, my sisters, who are not really my sisters, each noticed, with her own fine eyes, that things had got better with those bad peepers since I had ‘come home’. That was so. The air in the Western Isles is cleaner than it is in Oxford. Certain stresses were removed. I read around seven hundred pages a day, took notes, wrote letters. For the first time since late childhood, I did not accompany my family as they walked around the island. If I had done I might have fallen off it, but I didn’t say that to anyone. A heron came each morning and stood in the burn among the reeds, his small knees like knots.

I went across to Edinburgh, leaving the island on my own for the first time in my life. I cried when I left as the sea widened between the ferry and the island. I do not often cry, but crying has proved to be one of the few things that wash clear my sight, however briefly. I’ve been trying to take it up more.

I watched the island go, and the other islands pass: Jura, Islay, Mull, the Grey Dogs, the Isles of the Sea.

I went through, as the process of crossing Scotland’s waist is called, to Edinburgh, did a reading over breakfast of a short story or two to an audience in the mirrored tent at the Book Festival, which has been a kind of annual transfusion for me in the many years during which I have read more than I have written (which is not hard), and then bolted for a train down to London for another meeting of the Man Booker Prize judges.

I’d been going to fly, but a terrorist incident had grounded all planes and put the nation on its guard against, among other things, carriers of lipstick, scent or fountain pens. Guilty on all counts, I packed my longish frame and a 900-page novel into the vestibule, as the greased-up hinge between carriages of a passenger train is fabulously designated, of a southbound train, and settled to some hours’ standing room only.