An Invitation to the Country of the Blind

Here's your passport to a weird, sometimes beautiful new world

Hello! I’m reviving this extremely infrequent newsletter to announce that my first book comes out in less than two months. It’s called The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight. It’s now available for pre-order (hardcover, ebook, audiobook, large print!) via Bookshop, Amazon, Audible, et al.

So far the book has gotten a starred review from Publishers Weekly (“masterful… brilliant… nuanced… Enriched by its sparkling prose, this is an extraordinary and intellectually rigorous account of adapting to change”), a rave from Kirkus (“fascinating… Emotional but never sentimental, this quest for insight delivers for its readers”), inclusion on Lithub’s 25 Nonfiction Books You Need to Read This Summer list (“moving… fascinating… A brilliant investigative memoir written with humor and heart”) and PW’s 2023 Summer Reads Staff Picks (“Leland is… part of a new vanguard of writers… who interrogate disability with refreshing intellectual rigor, and this book-length study of blindness masterfully melds histories both personal and cultural”), and blurbs from Rachel Aviv, Joshua Cohen, Chloé Cooper Jones, Dave Eggers, Temple Grandin, and Georgina Kleege.

The book tells the story of how I became blind, incredibly slowly, over decades—and chronicles the pretty urgent quest I took to figure out how I fit into this strange (and often beautiful) country, where I’m now becoming a permanent resident. I use that experience as an opportunity to spelunk the wider world of blindness and disability, too. Along the way, I encounter:

• hardcore blindness trainers who made me wear vision-occluding sleep shades and then sent me out alone into Denver traffic to find my way home;

• blind Silicon Valley engineers soldering circuit boards by touch and inventing A.I. machine-vision-powered devices that tell them what’s in their refrigerators or what text is printed on the food package they just picked up (turns out it was a can of chili);

• some slimeball leaning against a deli near Penn Station who sneered at me as I passed with my white cane and then accused me of faking my blindness, which hurt because I already felt like I was faking it;

• blind producers in L.A. re-editing the soundtracks to their favorite TV shows so that they and other blind viewers will know who’s hot, who’s not, what race the actors are, and what everybody’s facial expressions are doing;

• blind artists making colorful, visually resplendent drawings of themselves as guide-dogs with many doggie nipples using secret tactile techniques;

• Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett’s blind protege, who told me that her blind pride inadvertently fueled her anti-abortion ideology;

• ableist rabbis, ableist doctors, ableist dads at the grill-out;

• and of course my wife and son, who are figuring out what it means to be blind right alongside me.

A few months ago, when I was proofreading the book’s index, many of the surprising juxtapositions reminded me of just how far afield this journey took me. Sidewalk “Curb cuts” for wheelchairs appeared alongside Curb Your Enthusiasm; or consider this representative indexical litany:

Plutarch

Podcasts

Polio

Politics

Pornhub

poverty

In a sonnet on the subject, John Milton described his experience of blindness as living “in this dark world and wide.” The world of blindness is indeed wide—far vaster than I ever could have guessed when I began this journey more than four years ago. I really hope you’ll come along for the ride—I left everything on the table with this thing, and I am convinced that… it rips!

You may be inclined to wait to get a copy until July 25 when the book is out, but I strongly recommend pre-ordering now. Pre-orders are (as you may have already learned from writers of other new books in emails that suspiciously resemble this one) crucial for a book’s success. They signal to bookstores and black-box e-commerce algorithms that a forthcoming title has momentum, incentivizing them to unlock the support and promotional levers that paradoxically only grant momentum to books with momentum. This is especially true of first-time authors like me, since I haven’t had a chance to prove myself yet (unless you count the years I spent editing the Believer magazine, or hosting the Organist podcast, or writing about blindness and disability for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Radiolab, 99 Percent Invisible, and elsewhere).

But it’s even more important to pre-order, I think, because it’s a book about blindness. When Penguin Press was weighing whether to take the book on, I got the sense that they thought that a lot of blind readers would buy the book. This is a reasonable assumption for any publisher to make. A book about yoga? All those strip-mall yogis will snap it up! Must be the same with blindness, right?

I nodded along, since at that time I still read print (with difficulty), and was just learning about the world of free digital libraries for the print-disabled. Now that I’ve retired from print (something that happened while I was writing and researching the book—not a convenient time to figure out how to use a screen reader, let me tell you), I know that in the US, if you’re blind, you never have to pay for books, even spanking-new mass-market blockbusters, and most blind people I know rarely do. This is because absent public subsidy, it's absurdly expensive to be a blind reader. At the risk of oversimplifying, imagine if the only way you could read a book was by reading it on a Kindle that cost $3,500 (the current cost of a quality refreshable braille display) and was manufactured by a niche company that hasn’t updated its tech in ten years and offers the same level of customer support as the company that manufactured your $6 digital watch. All that is on top of the cost of the book itself—and still doesn’t spare you from the weird typos and artifacts that result from the text’s journey to a readable format. Understandable, then, that the Library of Congress has a free braille and talking book library, and that Penguin Random House submits all their new titles to nonprofits like Bookshare as fully accessible EPUB files, which any eligible print-disabled person can download the day the book comes out, for free.

But all this also means that I probably won’t be helped too much by blind people in terms of sales. Which I am, make no mistake, utterly OK with. I was recently speaking to a group of blind students at a training center in Colorado, and I think I heavily endeared myself to them when, after someone asked how they could buy my book, I responded, “blind people shouldn’t pay for this book!” The blind unemployment rate is 70 percent (let that number sink in); their money is statistically better spent on food, rent, and technology (like that $3,500 refreshable braille display) that will help them secure access to education and employment.

And so I turn once more to you, the presumably sighted reader of this email, with the link that will allow you to preorder the book. (If you’re blind, and flush with cash, you don’t need me to remind you that the Kindle app is nicely accessible with VoiceOver for iOS, or that you can pre-order the audiobook; please knock yourself out!)

I’m so relieved that this email is almost over. Thank you so much for your support and your time and, if you’ve got the disposable income, for disposing it on a book that I feel confident will entertain and even enlighten you.

If you or someone you know is a book critic, podcast producer, TV news-anchor, or social media influencer, please pass this email along to them; I’m standing by to talk about blindness and A.I. or whatever else you fancy on your program.  And if cash is tight, you can always tweet about it, toot about it, Tik to the Tok, clamor on GoodReads. Take a nap, make a smoothie. Whatever happens, I’m grateful.

Yours, as ever,

Andrew

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