How I lost my sight and learned to read again

A temporary loss of vision turned this writer on to audio books

I’m lying in a dark hospital room, a bandage covering my right eye. It’s the middle of the night, but I’m wide awake. I need to do something. I turn on the light with the switch that lies on my stomach. That’s when remember I can barely see.

At 8pm the night before I had emergency surgery for a detached retina.  ‘What were you doing?’ everyone asks. ‘Er, nothing, actually,’ I protest. But people look skeptical, as if I must have been fighting, or lifting heavy weights, or bungee jumping.

I haven’t previously given my eyesight much thought. But, as with most things in life, you appreciate them when you’re in danger of losing them. With my reading eye out of action, I’m left with the longsighted one, useful for moving ahead without bumping into large objects, not so useful for discerning words on a page.

I optimistically shoved a book in my bag before I left home. Light on, I turn a page hopefully – it’s all a blur. I have a laptop and phone with me but I can’t see well enough to even switch them on and I don’t like to ask the nurses; they look as if they’ve got more pressing concerns at this busy public hospital. Instead, I lie back helplessly and fantasise about all the audio books and podcasts I can download when my family arrives in the morning.

I’ve never been particularly into audio books. I’ve listened to the odd children’s book on long distance trips and found them captivating. I’ve even written about their multiple benefits – ‘Yay! You can do the housework while listening to them, or drive, or run etc.’ But I love the written page, and usually devour one to two books per week.

Now, I despair of not being able to read.

The retinal detachment came out of nowhere after seeing black dots in my right eye. A quick google search told me these innocuous-seeming floaters are flecks of blood in the eye. Sounds sinister, but I wasn’t worried at first.

The next day though, a dark curtain crept across my vision and, panicked, I took myself to the optometrist. Hours later, an anesthetist loomed over me at Sydney Eye Hospital, prepping me for surgery.

In the morning, the doctor tells me the surgery went well and I may even recover full vision – in a few months. If I hadn’t been so quick, I could have lost vision in that eye. She discharges me but tells me casually I can’t return home to the Blue Mountains because the gas bubble remaining in my eye means I can’t travel to altitude quickly.

‘Where will I stay, what will I do?’ I protest. She shrugs; it’s not her problem.

A Sydney friend is going away and offers me their room for a week. My 14-year-old daughter stays for the weekend to help me with the switches on my devices and I try my first audio book that night. I instantly fall into a profound sleep. I don’t think it has anything to do with the book or the narrator; more a testament to my mental and physical exhaustion

One week in Sydney turns into another as the doctor tells me it’s still too soon to return to the Mountains. I meet an old friend who’s been legally blind since his twenties and we get talking about audio books. It’s all down to the narrator, he tells me, how good each one can be.

Once I’m set up with all the right apps, I discover a smorgasbord of titles in audio, with most mainstream novels, and plenty of classics, making it to the format.

Despair turns to excitement.

When a book finally absorbs me enough to stay awake, I understand what my friend meant about the narrator. An audio book is a performance too. When reading a book, you’re your own narrator. With audio, the experience hinges on the narrator’s interpretation.

When I first heard of audio books, I imagined a cast of actors in a room all playing different roles. But most novels are narrated by one person, often an accomplished actor or voice artist. (Some notable exceptions include George Saunders’ Booker-prize-winner Lincoln in the Bardo, narrated by a cast of thousands. Well, 166 people including the author, his family and friends, and award-winning actors and writers such as Lena Dunham and David Sedaris!)

That sounds a bit too much for me right now, so I settle for something familiar. I marvel as I listen to Helen Fitzgerald’s The Cry, with the narrator morphing from a middle-aged Australian man, to a younger Scottish woman, to an Australian teen girl, to an Australian-Vietnamese cop, convincingly enough.

I cringe, though, when the characters from Melbourne pronounce their city name as no Melbournian would, with the emphasis on the second syllable. Obviously this wasn’t produced by Australia’s largest audio book producer, Bolinda audio, whose studios are a stone’s throw from Melbourne’s airport.

Thinking about accents, I imagine all the amazing possibilities… James Joyce read by an Irish narrator and the cockney characters in a Dickens novel. And sure enough, they’re now on audio.

Then there’s that special dimension only an audio book can have – being narrated by its own author. With this in mind, I add Rick Morton’s reading of his acclaimed Australian memoir One Hundred Years of Dirt, and Michelle Obama’s Becoming read by Herself, to my expanding Wish List.

It’s the immersion of fiction I crave right now though and, as I settle into Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, I’m mesmerised by the narrator as she nails the voice of the comically misanthropic unnamed protagonist, and her irritating and needy friend, Reva. I can’t imagine enjoying this book more on the page.

Even when I regain some ability to read, it’s not pleasant; the print is slanting backwards across the page and I’m straining to grasp the words through a sludgy blur. I give my eyes an extended break and continue with audio. I’m convinced my own excessive reading and screen use has caused my retinal detachment. My doctor dismisses this idea. But I’m still not convinced and will continue my research

In the meantime, I ponder all the other things that could have happened in my life so far, as my body succumbs to middle age, and remain grateful that my eye will probably re-gain its vision. And I thank God for audio books.

Want to know more about audio books? Click here.

Liz Durnan is a writer and an avid reader and listener of books.