What I found, however, was one of the most beautiful stories I have ever read.
It sounded interesting to me because I don't know much about blindness or being blind and the cover promised that this would be a humorous account. I found this memoir in the biographies section of an annual used book fair held in a local school. And it's worth reading even if he didn't intentionally mix hollandaise into the ash tray while you slaved in the dish pit way back when. We drank at the same pub (not while I was 14) and bought cheese at the same deli.Ģ0 years ago Ryan was sharp, witty, poetic and insightful. We didn't keep in touch after that summer we worked together (I was 14, remember?) but I can hardly believe our paths didn't cross. When he talks about losing his shoe at a concert in Vancouver, I'm thinking, "hey, I remember where I was when Lush played the Commodore!" And on and on it went. While for most people this is a "book about a blind guy", albeit a funny one, this was for me a life after Langley coming of age. Reading this was like a one-sided reunion. When I saw Cockeyed on the Canada Reads 2012 list, I thought, hey, is this that, Ryan? Well, it is! He and the owner teased me their fair share and I loved it. When Ryan Knighton was 18 and I was 14, we both worked at the same restaurant in Suburbia. Readers will find it hard to put down this wild ride around their everyday world with a wicked, smart, blind guide at the wheel. Knighton is powerful and irreverent in words and thought, and impatient with the preciousness we’ve come to expect from books on disability. His experience of blindness offers unexpected perspectives on sight and the other senses, culture, identity, language, and our fears and fantasies.Ĭockeyed is not a conventional confessional.
Stumbling literally and emotionally into darkness, into love, and into adulthood, he uses his disability to provide a window into the human condition. In this penetrating, nervy memoir, which ricochets between meditation and black comedy, Knighton tells the story of his fifteen-year descent into blindness while incidentally revealing the world of the sighted in all its phenomenal peculiarity. An irreverent, tragicomic, astoundingly articulate memoir about going blind-and growing up On his eighteenth birthday, Ryan Knighton was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a congenital, progressive disease marked by night-blindness, tunnel vision, and, eventually, total blindness.
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