At age sixteen, James Tate Hill was diagnosed with Leber's hereditary
optic neuropathy, a condition that left him legally blind. After
high-school friends stopped calling and a disability counselor advised
him to aim for Cs in his classes, he used his remaining blurry
peripheral vision to pretend he could still see. Feigning eye contact,
memorizing common routes, filling shelves with paperbacks he read via
tape cassettes, he organized his life around passing for sighted. A
wealth of pop-culture knowledge allowed him to steer conversations from
what he couldn't see. For fifteen years, Hill hid his blindness from
friends, colleagues, and lovers, even convincing himself that if he
stared long enough, things would come into focus. At thirty, faced with
a stalled writing career, a crumbling marriage, and a growing fear of
leaving his apartment, he began to wonder if there was a better way.