Cockeyed: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Ryan Knighton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 29, 2006

On his 18th birthday, Ryan Knighton was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP), a congenital, progressive disease marked by night-blindness, tunnel vision and, eventually, total blindness. 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. Knighton learns to drive while unseeing; has his first significant relationship—with a deaf woman; navigates the punk rock scene and men's washrooms; learns to use a cane; and tries to pass for seeing while teaching English to children in Korea. Stumbling literally and emotionally into darkness, into love, into couch-shopping at Ikea, into adulthood, and into truce if not acceptance of his identity as a blind man, his writerly self uses his disability to provide a window onto the human condition. His experience of blindness offers unexpected insights into sight and the other senses, culture, identity, language, our fears and fantasies. Cockeyed is not a conventional confessional. Knighton is powerful and irreverent in words and thought and impatient with the preciousness we've come to expect from books on disability. Readers will find it hard to put down this wild ride around their everyday world with a wicked, smart, blind guide at the wheel.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Knighton, who teaches at Capilano College in Vancouver, started going blind in his teens, and in this hilarious and unsentimental yet moving memoir, he tells what it was like to lose his eyesight. He was born in the early 1970s, grew up in British Columbia and by 1987 was showing signs of poor vision. He began losing his sight early enough that the time frames of his coming-of-age and his coming-of-blindness overlap. Milestones such as his first driving experiences and his first relationships with girls, which would have been ordinary for other teenagers, were anything but for him. As he moved into adulthood, he also moved further into sightlessness, yet he turns the story into something so bracing that it reads like a travelogue—you can't wait to know where he's going next, whether it's to attend college in Vancouver, teach English in South Korea or get married. Wit can be a weapon, but can also be a kind of walking stick; being so gifted clearly guided Knighton long before anything began to happen to his eyes. Luckily for his readers, he was also gifted with a different kind of care and clear-sightedness, never stumbling into the maudlin. His book is an invitation to take a journey that no reader should refuse, to see life through another lens. (June)
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Review

"Knighton's honest and sarcastic style enable him to balance the humor of pathos with the burn of poignancy..." -- Rain Taxi Review of Books'

"The narrative is powerful and irreverent, and readers will find it impossible to put down." -- Tuscon Citizen, 6/1/06

"engaging, often moving...This is a thoughtful and likeable book. It is, most certainly, an eye-opener." -- Times (UK), January 28, 2007

"exceptional ... Cockeyed gleefully plays up the slapstick of his situation but it's still an eye-opening account." -- GQ (UK), January 2007

"unexpectedly and frequently funny...and his total lack of self pity makes this book an enlightening and enjoyable read." -- Vogue (UK), January 2007

"unparalleled user's guide to blindness that will benefit the sighted as much as the sightless" -- Sunday Telegraph (UK), January 14, 2007

Knighton's talent shines on every page of this feisty, bittersweet memoir... a compelling, sturdy read. -- Entertainment Weekly

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: PublicAffairs; 1St Edition edition (May 29, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1586483293
• ISBN-13: 978-1586483296
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #729,165 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A haunting and powerful debut from a truly gifted writer, July 17, 2006

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cockeyed: A Memoir (Hardcover)

At the age of 18, Ryan Knighton was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP), a congenital, progressive illness that begins with diminished night vision and degenerates into total loss of vision. Currently, he has access to only 1% of his eyesight. Yet, instead of wallowing in his predicament, he has written a pithy, moving and delightfully snarky memoir that chronicles the ups and downs of his 15-year relationship with blindness.

Despite the sober truth of Knighton's story and the somber mood that one might expect to accompany its telling, there are many sections in COCKEYED that are immensely funny and lighthearted. His recollections of pre-diagnosis adolescence are priceless and exactly the types of experiences you'd imagine a gawky teenage kid to have --- the time he almost killed his co-worker while driving a forklift; the time he wrecked his dad's car by getting it stuck on top of a pile of boulders; the time he (literally) lost his pants while at a punk rock club --- all are incidents worthy of a smile and a knowing grin, if you ignore the reason why they occurred in the first place. COCKEYED is anything but excessively dramatic, and Knighton certainly pays tribute to how funny these events must have seemed at the time from an outside perspective.

On the flipside, COCKEYED's darker moments are full of bleary isolationism, loss and self-deprecation. Yet, Knighton never seems to despair when reliving them, but instead pushes on as if talking about it might somehow redeem him and help others who might suffer similar fates. During the first few years following his diagnosis, he tried to outsmart his failing eyesight and it is painful to read about him bumbling about (again, literally), refusing his disease. It is only after he barely avoided getting hit by an oncoming car that he finally recognized the severity of his condition. This realization and the bleak period that followed is one of the hardest scenes to digest in the book because it is the first time we see him face the permanence of his disease and finally understand that he must learn to live with its consequences.

In another incredibly moving and painfully honest chapter entitled "Missing," Knighton talks about his younger brother Rory's sudden and seemingly accidental death from a morphine overdose (his new girlfriend slipped him the pills). The way he deals with this loss independently of and in relation to his blindness is so raw, it's almost beautiful: "I know now that Rory's death made me a different man and a different blind man...More than anything, his death forced me to make room for a world that didn't revolve around my blindness...I thought I knew loss, but what did I know? Little. That's why, when we laid Rory to rest, I tried to put something to rest in me, too. That's what I owe him and me." The ever-introspective Knighton clearly has a way with words, even when describing the gravest of circumstances.

In spite of all the hardship, never mind his lack of sight, it is evident from reading COCKEYED that Knighton has moved mountains in his life and the lives of those around him, albeit sometimes by the skin of his teeth. He taught English to kids in Korea and managed to hide the fact that he was blind for months before anyone was the wiser. He traveled to New Orleans with his first girlfriend, Jane (who was deaf), and avoided getting mugged because of his cane. He married his long-time girlfriend (despite a brief separation post-Korea stint) whom he is able to feel "a necessary relief from [his] individuality, from blindness, from all [his] differences, be they subtle or bold." Whether blind or seeing, he was and still is a force to be reckoned with, a person who has decided to take life standing up despite a handicap that had intended to push him down.

There are plenty of touching and insightful moments in COCKEYED --- too many to count. Knighton's natural penchant for getting at the heart of things is both deeply refreshing and highly venerable. He picks at the underbelly of human experience and exposes its tenderness with grace and wit --- a rare and balanced combination, struck by a well-traveled soul. This is a haunting and powerful debut from a truly gifted writer.

--- Reviewed by Alexis Burling

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Some Good Material, But Not Perfect, October 9, 2006

By 

Backfist (Carmel, IN USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Cockeyed: A Memoir (Hardcover)

I really wanted to like this book. Some of the descriptions of the narrator's increasingly challenging interactions with the world are wonderful. After reading it, I can well imagine what it feels like to be in a noisy club when you can barely see, or what it's like to navigate a stariway with only a cane for guidance. Even the relationship challenges are interesting and (to me) unprecedented.

But sometimes there is just too much of a good thing. The in-depth narration gets tiring when it strays to non-pertinent events like teaching overseas. There are some good anecdotes, but they break up the stark reality of the growing handicap.

Is it right to only give 3 stars to a book about blindness? Probably not. The author is great! I'll buy his next book for sure. But this one just didn't "get" me.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Strong Story of Going Blind, June 25, 2006

By 

John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cockeyed: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Eighteen, just out of highschool, beginning to discover girls. A time when your whole life beckons you forward. The world is yours to conquer.

Eighteen, his age when the doctor told him that he had a congenital, progressive disease that would make him totally blind in a few years.

While this is a story of the descent into blindness, it isn't the maudlin, sad story that you might expect. Knighton leaves no doubt in your mind that this is the life he would prefer, but he also leaves you with the understanding that his life isn't so bad. The hardest part, I believe, was the time of the growing blindness. When do you admit that you have a problem so severe that you need a white cane? As he says, he didn't get the manual on going blind. His stories of asking for things like directions to the men's room and being told 'over there,' make you understand better than any description of what he has to go through.

It is hard to put this book down. Kingman is blind, but he's also smart with a wicked sense of humor.