Going Blind: A Memoir

by Mara Faulkner

Finalist for the 2010 Minnesota Book Award presented by the Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library

Mara Faulkner grew up in a family shaped by Irish ancestry, a close-to-the-bone existence in rural North Dakota, and the secret of her father's blindness--along with the silence and shame surrounding it. Dennis Faulkner had retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease that gradually blinded him and one that may blind many members of his family, including the author. Moving and insightful, Going Blind explores blindness in its many permutations--within the context of the author's family, more broadly, as a disability marked by misconceptions, and as a widely used cultural metaphor. Mara Faulkner delicately weaves her family's story into an analysis of the roots and ramifications of the various metaphorical meanings of blindness, touching on the Catholic Church of the 1940s and 1950s, Japanese internment, the Germans from Russia who dominated her hometown, and the experiences of Native people in North Dakota. Neither sentimental nor dispassionate, the author asks whether it's possible to find gifts when sight is lost.

Genres: Nonfiction, Disability

241 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Jeanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the things I look for in a book is that it makes me look at the world differently (pun intended). This book moved in 20 different directions, using metaphors on blindness to enlarge my views of sightedness, visual deficits, disability, prejudice, and more.

[Keri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sister Mara was my creative writing teacher in college. In this memoir, Sister Mara uses memory, history, and other memoirs to explore notions of blindness and sight, lightness and dark, ability and disability, justice and injustice, and silence and memory. She describes her childhood in Mandan, North Dakota, growing up with her grocer father who became progressively blind, passing the condition on to her and her siblings. She examines the reverberations of the Irish Famine and the displacement of the Mandan Indian tribe by the Garrison Dam Project on her life and family. Her writing is such a pleasure and I learned a lot. It's a lovely book.

[RH Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

A short deep book about Faulkner's memories of her father's blindness and growing up on a farm in North Dakota. Riffing on the many definitions and metaphors of blindness as springboards for her experiences and insights, Faulkner also writes about the immigrant legacy of the Irish famine, the ruin of native Mandan land and culture as a result of the Garrison dam, the history of German-Russians in the Dakotas (Lawrence Welk was one) and the state of the blind in the world today -- 50-70% are unemployed and have great challenges finding work; worldwide 70% of blindness is a result of poverty and malnutrition. Written with curiosity, patience and love.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A view into a life marred by the physical disability of her father and the crippling emotional effects on his family. The rural life in the middle of nowhere in the Dakotas certainly also contributed to the sense that there was no escape for anyone. Luckily the author had an interior life and was able to go off to college.

The same things that hurt her family (the poverty, the blindness, the isolation) also contributed to a core of inner strength and gave her a depth she wouldn't have had without the childhood crises.

The book is matter of fact, eloquent and spare. It only took me as long as it did to read it because I had to repeatedly stop and savor the quiet darkness on its pages.

That anyone in the family went on to have a normal life is a mystery to me but I think people in those days out on the prairie were made of sterner stuff.

[Maggie Sievers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mara Faulkner has written a book that all people with disabilities, or who are blind, or who know people with blindness should read. Although she too is losing her sight to RP, this is not a book about self-pity. Rather it is a book for and about people who have limited sight, are blind, are going blind, or who know people who have limited sight. She weaves together how blindness, beyond the obvious personal limitations, that the individual and their families endure; how society has dealt with the blind; and as a metaphor for how all of us use the term "blindness": wearing blinders, turning a blind eye, blind faith, blind spot.

[Angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Author Mara Faulkner rachets up the memoir by asking and then investigating all her Why? questions: why did her dad seem bigoted toward the English? Why was he kind to blacks? Why were the Native Americans in her town skittish around whites? What did his blindness do for and against him in the discrimination department? Her scholarship is excellent, her conculsions forthright and evenhanded, her evaluation of her father, and of herself, are not sentimental, but deep.Well done.

[Gwen Rosha · Rating 2 out of 5]

It read like a college history textbook, and I was hoping for more of her story with her family. It did offer good insights on interacting with people who are visually impaired.