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I remember my uncle and my father telling me that my mother didn't want me because I was blind. She thought being blind was a disgrace and a punishment from God. I understand that a lot of young mothers probably wouldn't know what to do in that situation, but over your life you learn to forgive everything.

When my mother died, I fell apart. My father wanted to control me. As a consequence, I ran away to America.

I said something really stupid once. I told a friend that my mother was so beautiful, but my dad was ugly. My dad heard it and just laughed it off, but I felt guilty. It haunted me for years. I should never have said that.

When my father realized he was going blind, he took up golf.

One of the most persistent misconceptions about blindness is that it is a curse from God for misdeeds perpetrated in a past life, which cloaks the blind person in spiritual darkness and makes him not just dangerous, but evil.

When I was very young, my father had an accident. He fell down a flight of stairs, fractured his skull, and lost sight in one eye.

My mother, brave woman, lost her whole family when she decided to marry a black man in the '60s. When the marriage fell apart, she had to come back to her family.

My mother had been blind as a child. And so, blindness was something that has long fascinated me, but also it's something I find really, really scary.

My mother's face floated to mind, a pale, reproachful moon, at her last and first visit to the asylum since my twentieth birthday. A daughter in an asylum! I had done that to her. Still, she had obviously decided to forgive me.

I saw my parents as gods whose every wish must be obeyed or I would suffer the penalty of anguish and guilt.