I wish I'd written this review just after finishing the book rather than waiting so long because I want to truly be able to explain how much this book irritated me, and I just can't come up with many specific examples or reasoning anymore.

For starters, this book was so overwritten. Not everything needs to be described with so many adjectives and metaphors. Like sometimes the curtains can just be curtains. I don't need three paragraphs waxing poetic for me to understand that they're thick and dark. It felt like everything in this book was just so over described.

I also struggled a bit with the fact that she rarely talked about anything in the book that wasn't directly related to her light sensitivity. Normally with memoirs, even specific topic driven memoirs, you can get kind of a sense of the person's life and who they are. But I feel like Lyndsey didn't include much of anything outside of her illness. It was just that, and it made it hard for me to connect with her as a person. It didn't feel like a full story.

My last and biggest issue was that I had a hard time buying her story. Usually with memoirs I make an active choice to take everything at face value because they're personal stories. It doesn't do much good to question everything and it doesn't matter to me so much if it's one hundred percent accurate. But there were so many points in this book where I struggled with that. It's not that I thought she was lying, more like I had so many unanswered questions that it felt incomplete to me. Like I wasn't getting all the information available. For example, she doesn't really go to the doctor for most of the book. Like for years she doesn't make any effort to see a doctor. This is a woman who has to limit the time she spends in her kitchen because even the light from the timer on the oven affects her. And it felt off. Like again, not saying she's lying and maybe she did go to the doctor and just didn't write about it, but there were so many instances in the book where it felt like the choices made were too odd and didn't make sense for the situation. And again, just because she didn't offer answers doesn't mean there weren't answers. But it was a problem to me that I had so many unanswered questions that made the story unenjoyable.

She refuses to ever consider her condition might be psychological in nature, which it may or may not be, but then seems to be getting magically cured by the end of the book. Like nothing changed. No medication, no new doctors, she won't interact with anyone who even so much as suggests it might be psychological (which again, understandable if it isn't- having people suggest your illness is made up sucks, but also she wouldn't see any doctors or do anything medical to try to figure it out either). And then it sort of just starts getting better for no reason.

I struggled with this a lot. I couldn't recommend it to people and to be perfectly honestly, reading it felt like a waste of my time.