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In Love With Daylight: A Memoir of Recovery
A distinguished man of letters culls wisdom from his encounters with illness and addiction.
- GenresMemoirNonfiction
252 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
2 people are currently reading
154 people want to read
About the author
Wilfrid Sheed
31 books19 followersSheed was born in London to Francis "Frank" Sheed and Mary "Maisie" Ward, prominent Roman Catholic publishers (Sheed & Ward) in the United Kingdom and the United States during the mid-20th century. Wilfrid Sheed spent his childhood in both England and the United States before attending Downside School and Lincoln College, Oxford where he earned BA (1954) and MA (1957) degrees.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 9, 2021
“They tried to make me go to Rehab
But I said no, no, no”
-- Amy Winehouse
During the confinement of 2020, no doubt in search for schadenfreude, I started reading memoirs written by writers and drinkers – naturally overlapping populations -- among them A Drinking Life by Pete Hamill and Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp, both entertaining about doing journalism and insightful about doing booze. In Knapp’s book I came across this quote by a writer named Wilfrid Sheed:
“Giving up booze felt at first like nothing so much as sitting in a great art gallery and watching the paintings being removed one by one until there was nothing left up there but bare white walls.”
Prompted by Sheed’s turn of phrase, I bought his book. Sheed tells a story of surviving three diseases – polio as a boy, and alcoholism and cancer as an adult. Sounds depressing, right? It is not because Sheed, an essayist and author of an array of books, is the ideal dinner companion: erudite, clever and removed enough from the subject matter at hand to favor retort over regret even in the most emotionally fraught of situations, such as being flattened to a bed by polio or entrapped in a endless circle of sharing while in rehab.
Sadly, an engaging cross-table conversation does not make for a great book. A little wit goes a long way, and Sheed does not know when to stop. (Perhaps another round of rehab for excessive witticism.) I did, though, and I bailed on the book 150 pages in.
That said, with used copies available for five bucks, fans of the genre and aficionados of the well-delivered bon mot might find it worth the browse.
Some examples:
* Sickness is like a hostile takeover in which the part of your mind which hurts manages completely to dominate and silence the rest of you.
* Hegel’s definition of walking: “a series of attempts to fall down, constantly arrested.”
* Nothing ages faster than this year’s disaster victim.
But I said no, no, no”
-- Amy Winehouse
During the confinement of 2020, no doubt in search for schadenfreude, I started reading memoirs written by writers and drinkers – naturally overlapping populations -- among them A Drinking Life by Pete Hamill and Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp, both entertaining about doing journalism and insightful about doing booze. In Knapp’s book I came across this quote by a writer named Wilfrid Sheed:
“Giving up booze felt at first like nothing so much as sitting in a great art gallery and watching the paintings being removed one by one until there was nothing left up there but bare white walls.”
Prompted by Sheed’s turn of phrase, I bought his book. Sheed tells a story of surviving three diseases – polio as a boy, and alcoholism and cancer as an adult. Sounds depressing, right? It is not because Sheed, an essayist and author of an array of books, is the ideal dinner companion: erudite, clever and removed enough from the subject matter at hand to favor retort over regret even in the most emotionally fraught of situations, such as being flattened to a bed by polio or entrapped in a endless circle of sharing while in rehab.
Sadly, an engaging cross-table conversation does not make for a great book. A little wit goes a long way, and Sheed does not know when to stop. (Perhaps another round of rehab for excessive witticism.) I did, though, and I bailed on the book 150 pages in.
That said, with used copies available for five bucks, fans of the genre and aficionados of the well-delivered bon mot might find it worth the browse.
Some examples:
* Sickness is like a hostile takeover in which the part of your mind which hurts manages completely to dominate and silence the rest of you.
* Hegel’s definition of walking: “a series of attempts to fall down, constantly arrested.”
* Nothing ages faster than this year’s disaster victim.
February 25, 2020
Normally I have no interest in books like this but I'll read anything by Sheed and this did not disappoint.
November 27, 2021
Loved this. Sheed talks about bouts of polio, addiction/depression, and cancer, and takes all the heroism out of these fights - they're just what we do - which doesn't mean they're easy. The pain of how little we know about addiction and mental illness still resonates.
December 13, 2022
"It had always been a notion of mine that sanity is like a clearing in the jungle where the humans agree to meet from time to time and behave in certain fixed ways that even a baboon could master, like Englishmen dressing for dinner in the tropics."
April 5, 2012
I tried multiple times to read this - maybe I'm just too tired, but I couldn't finish it. I didn't even get through his experience with polio to move on. Let me know if I should pick it up and try it again.
January 24, 2011
Very eloquent, often sly, and quite blindingly honest memoir about a trifecta of polio, alcoholism and cancer that never quite brought this buoyant author down.
April 19, 2016
I savored every word of this amazing memoir. Sheed, who sadly passed away in 2011, turns life crushing physical and psycohological events into humor and a deep gratitude for life.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews