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A World of Light
From the winner of the 2004 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction
In his award-winning memoir In the Shadow of Memory , Floyd Skloot told the hard story of coming to terms with a brain-ravaging virus. A World of Light , written with the same insight, passion, and humor that distinguished the earlier volume, moves Skloot’s story from the reassembly of a self after neurological calamity to the reconstruction of a shattered life. More than fifteen years after a viral attack compromised his memory and cognitive powers, Skloot now must do the vital work of recreating a cohesive life for himself even as he confronts the late stages of his mother’s advancing dementia. With tenderness and candor, he finds surprising connection with her where it had long been missing, transforming the end of her life into a time of unexpected renewal.
At the same time, Skloot and his wife are building a rich new life at the center of a small isolated forest on a hillside in rural Oregon, where a dwindling water supply and the bitter assaults of the weather bring an elemental perspective to his attempts to make himself once more at home in the world. By turns poignant, funny, and frightening, A World of Light balances the urgency to capture fragmented, fleeting memories with the necessity of living fully in the present.
In his award-winning memoir In the Shadow of Memory , Floyd Skloot told the hard story of coming to terms with a brain-ravaging virus. A World of Light , written with the same insight, passion, and humor that distinguished the earlier volume, moves Skloot’s story from the reassembly of a self after neurological calamity to the reconstruction of a shattered life. More than fifteen years after a viral attack compromised his memory and cognitive powers, Skloot now must do the vital work of recreating a cohesive life for himself even as he confronts the late stages of his mother’s advancing dementia. With tenderness and candor, he finds surprising connection with her where it had long been missing, transforming the end of her life into a time of unexpected renewal.
At the same time, Skloot and his wife are building a rich new life at the center of a small isolated forest on a hillside in rural Oregon, where a dwindling water supply and the bitter assaults of the weather bring an elemental perspective to his attempts to make himself once more at home in the world. By turns poignant, funny, and frightening, A World of Light balances the urgency to capture fragmented, fleeting memories with the necessity of living fully in the present.
- GenresMemoirNonfictionEssays
216 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2005
1 person is currently reading
25 people want to read
About the author
Floyd Skloot
52 books19 followersFloyd was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1947, and moved to Long Beach, NY, ten years later. He graduated from Franklin & Marshall College with a B.A. in English, and completed an M.A. in English at Southern Illinois University, where he studied with the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella. From 1972 until becoming disabled by viral-borne brain damage in 1988, Floyd worked in the field of public policy in Illinois, Washington, and Oregon. He began publishing poetry in 1970, fiction in 1975, and essays in 1990. His work has appeared in many major literary journals in the US and abroad. His seventeen books have won wide acclaim and numerous awards, and are included in many high school and college curricula. In May, 2006 he received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Franklin & Marshall College.
An Oregonian since 1984, Floyd moved from Portland to rural Amity when he married Beverly Hallberg in 1993. They lived in a cedar yurt in the middle of twenty hilly acres of woods for 13 years before moving back to Portland.
Floyd's daughter, the nonfiction writer Rebecca Skloot, lives in Memphis, TN, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Memphis and works as a freelance writer. Her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, was published by Crown Books in February, 2010 and became an immediate NY Times and Indie Bound bestseller. Her work has been included in the Best Creative Nonfiction, Best Food Writing and Women’s Best Friend anthologies as well as appearing regularly in the New York Times Magazine, Popular Science, O: Oprah’s Magazine and elsewhere. Her boyfriend, writer and actor David Prete, author of Say That to My Face (Norton, 2003), recently completed his second book of fiction and teaches writers how to improve their public reading skills. Floyd's stepson, Matthew Coale, lives with his wife and two children in Vancouver, Washington.
Floyd's current projects include new poems and essays that are slowly shaping into a new book.
An Oregonian since 1984, Floyd moved from Portland to rural Amity when he married Beverly Hallberg in 1993. They lived in a cedar yurt in the middle of twenty hilly acres of woods for 13 years before moving back to Portland.
Floyd's daughter, the nonfiction writer Rebecca Skloot, lives in Memphis, TN, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Memphis and works as a freelance writer. Her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, was published by Crown Books in February, 2010 and became an immediate NY Times and Indie Bound bestseller. Her work has been included in the Best Creative Nonfiction, Best Food Writing and Women’s Best Friend anthologies as well as appearing regularly in the New York Times Magazine, Popular Science, O: Oprah’s Magazine and elsewhere. Her boyfriend, writer and actor David Prete, author of Say That to My Face (Norton, 2003), recently completed his second book of fiction and teaches writers how to improve their public reading skills. Floyd's stepson, Matthew Coale, lives with his wife and two children in Vancouver, Washington.
Floyd's current projects include new poems and essays that are slowly shaping into a new book.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 23, 2025
A World of Light, by Floyd Skloot, is about his mother's Alzheimers and his own ongoing process to reconstruct his memory after a debilitation brain virus that caused dementia. I went to hear Skloot read at Elliott Bay Books in 2011 and bought this book, originally published in 2005. Then it sat waiting for the right moment to read; I'm so glad I finally read this book. He is an excellent writer integrating information about the brain, and the differences between the slow degeneration of the brain with Alzheimers versus the diagnosis of dementia, which is sudden and from an insult to the brain.
About the ability to remember, with his reconstruction of his memories, he looks to Daniel L. Schacter's book, The Seven Sins of Memory, and quotes him, "To persist in long-term memory, then, events must have real significance. Usually, that significance is negative. "The primary territory of persistence," Schacter says, is "disappointment, regret, failure, sadness, and trauma." Memories strongly linked with our emotional lives, what Schacter calls "hot memories," are the kind that typically endure despite our best efforts to forget them. This doesn't mean positive memories can't endure as well . . . . Only that tenacity of memory, which is made possible by chemical and biological responses to powerful experience, most commonly occurs when an experience is negative."
His mother declining into Alzheimers, he moves her across country from the East coast to the West closer to him. She was an irascible and abusive woman in his childhood and both him and his brother moved far from home. His brother died young. His mother is in a memory care facility and him and his wife, Beverly, visit her at first weekly that moves to every three to four weeks. His language is irascible and many sentences sing. And speaking of singing, his mother turns to song in her long years of decline as a main form of communication. She remembers lyrics and even as they start to go and the songs get simpler, with the song three blind mice, she fills in where she doesn't know the words with scat.
He has a wonderful chapter, The Simple Wisdom, about his mentor, Thomas Kinsella, an Irish poet who moved to Illinois to teach at Southern Illinois University. Kinsella was not what he expected, by the time he studied with him Kinsella was seeking work that was not formed with form, but he, "talked about stripping away everything that stood between the song and its expression, things that like predetermined forms and logic, imposed shape, literary reference, anything that implied the presence of a writer behind the poem." For this chapter alone writers need to read this book!
A big part of the book about his recovery is about where he lives and two chapters explore this in great depth. He has moved from urban Portland to Beverly's house in the country. This move has been excellent for his mental health, for his brain damage, and for his writing. For him it was a coming home, his ancestors were rural in Russia. But living away from a city there are water problems, they had to dig two wells, through basalt deep into the earth, and still the pressure is not good so it is a constant worry. There is a chapter on where they might move. But they do not move, at least in this book, the advantages outweigh the problems with water.
Near the ending he writes about healing, "It's about restoring the body's relationship to the vital energy of the universe. Some approach healing by seeking to suppress symptoms, attacking the apparent cause, while others approach it by working with the symptoms rather than against them, supplementing the body's effort to heal itself. Still others approach healing by trying to correct their attitudes of their way of life, or by prayer, by pilgrimage, appeasement. Or by a combination of all these approaches."
He mentions the artist Jean Dubuffet, that the snow melting along the side of the roads left bizarre formations that look like his sculptures. When I looked him up I realized I've seen his sculptures, but hadn't know the artist. A bonus! Now I'm excited to read his book from 2003, In the Shadow of Memory.
About the ability to remember, with his reconstruction of his memories, he looks to Daniel L. Schacter's book, The Seven Sins of Memory, and quotes him, "To persist in long-term memory, then, events must have real significance. Usually, that significance is negative. "The primary territory of persistence," Schacter says, is "disappointment, regret, failure, sadness, and trauma." Memories strongly linked with our emotional lives, what Schacter calls "hot memories," are the kind that typically endure despite our best efforts to forget them. This doesn't mean positive memories can't endure as well . . . . Only that tenacity of memory, which is made possible by chemical and biological responses to powerful experience, most commonly occurs when an experience is negative."
His mother declining into Alzheimers, he moves her across country from the East coast to the West closer to him. She was an irascible and abusive woman in his childhood and both him and his brother moved far from home. His brother died young. His mother is in a memory care facility and him and his wife, Beverly, visit her at first weekly that moves to every three to four weeks. His language is irascible and many sentences sing. And speaking of singing, his mother turns to song in her long years of decline as a main form of communication. She remembers lyrics and even as they start to go and the songs get simpler, with the song three blind mice, she fills in where she doesn't know the words with scat.
He has a wonderful chapter, The Simple Wisdom, about his mentor, Thomas Kinsella, an Irish poet who moved to Illinois to teach at Southern Illinois University. Kinsella was not what he expected, by the time he studied with him Kinsella was seeking work that was not formed with form, but he, "talked about stripping away everything that stood between the song and its expression, things that like predetermined forms and logic, imposed shape, literary reference, anything that implied the presence of a writer behind the poem." For this chapter alone writers need to read this book!
A big part of the book about his recovery is about where he lives and two chapters explore this in great depth. He has moved from urban Portland to Beverly's house in the country. This move has been excellent for his mental health, for his brain damage, and for his writing. For him it was a coming home, his ancestors were rural in Russia. But living away from a city there are water problems, they had to dig two wells, through basalt deep into the earth, and still the pressure is not good so it is a constant worry. There is a chapter on where they might move. But they do not move, at least in this book, the advantages outweigh the problems with water.
Near the ending he writes about healing, "It's about restoring the body's relationship to the vital energy of the universe. Some approach healing by seeking to suppress symptoms, attacking the apparent cause, while others approach it by working with the symptoms rather than against them, supplementing the body's effort to heal itself. Still others approach healing by trying to correct their attitudes of their way of life, or by prayer, by pilgrimage, appeasement. Or by a combination of all these approaches."
He mentions the artist Jean Dubuffet, that the snow melting along the side of the roads left bizarre formations that look like his sculptures. When I looked him up I realized I've seen his sculptures, but hadn't know the artist. A bonus! Now I'm excited to read his book from 2003, In the Shadow of Memory.
February 27, 2017
Lovely read. Floyd Skloot is the best essay writer I've ever had the pleasure of both reading and meeting.
December 7, 2025
Beautifully written. Lyrical. Imaginative. Insightful. Both sad and humorous. A really worthwhile read.
Read
February 5, 2009The current memoir vogue would have Skloot belaboring the tortures he endured at the hands of his mother, all piled upon more hand-wringing, blame, and navel-gazing through dilated pupils. Though his understated approach has probably consigned him to a university press (a place where he's comfortable; he's an accomplished poet after all), the critics that bother to take notice of this small book find it, like his first essay collection In the Shadow of Memory (**** Sept/Oct 2003), a masterful effort. Words like "nourishing" and "grace" paint a fair picture of reviewers' tones; they respect his accomplishment as much as they respect the effort that must have gone into creating it. It makes one believe that, if we only remembered what was important, life might be much more rewarding.
This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.
March 10, 2012
I really enjoyed Skloot's previous two collections of writings, and I enjoyed this one too.
This one is very different to the other two though as Skloot barely mentions his illness at all in this one.
I came to know (and love) Skloot's writing because I could relate to his experiences with having a severe neurological illness. He writes so eloquently about all the symptoms and describes many of them so well, better than I've ever read anywhere else; it was like reading my own diary written by someone else at times! Wonderful writing.
But I also came to just like reading what Skloot had to say when it wasn't about his illness too. So I'd highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoyed either of his previous books - just don't buy it if you're only after more insights and discussions of his illness because they just aren't there!
This one is very different to the other two though as Skloot barely mentions his illness at all in this one.
I came to know (and love) Skloot's writing because I could relate to his experiences with having a severe neurological illness. He writes so eloquently about all the symptoms and describes many of them so well, better than I've ever read anywhere else; it was like reading my own diary written by someone else at times! Wonderful writing.
But I also came to just like reading what Skloot had to say when it wasn't about his illness too. So I'd highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoyed either of his previous books - just don't buy it if you're only after more insights and discussions of his illness because they just aren't there!
March 24, 2016
Floyd Skloot writes about the brain like no one else. I have learned so much from him.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews