Ordinary Daylight

Andrew Potok is an intense, vigorous, sensual man--and a gifted painter. Then, passing forty, he rapidly begins to go blind from an inherited eye disease, retinitis pigmentosa. Depressed and angry, he rages at the losses that are eradicating his life as an artist, his sources of pleasure, his competence as a man. He hates himself for becoming blind. But as he will ultimately discover, and as this remarkable memoir recounts, it is not the end of the world. It is the beginning.

Ordinary Daylight

This the story of Potokâ s remarkable odyssey out of despair. He attempts to come to terms with his condition: learning skills for the newly blind, dealing with freakish encounters with the medical establishment, going to London for a promised cure through a bizarre and painful â therapyâ of bee stings. He wrestles with the anguish of knowing that his daughter has inherited the same disease that is stealing his own eyesight. And then, as he edges ever closer to complete blindness, there comes the day when he recognizes that the exhilaration he once found in the mix of paint and canvas, hand and eye, he has begun to find in words.

By turns fierce, blunt, sexy, and uproariously funny, Andrew Potokâ s memoir of his journey is as shatteringly frank as it is triumphant.

“Extraordinary . . . a beautiful book.”
--Chicago Tribune Book World

“More absorbing than any novel, the story is also more impressive because it is true. . . . Highly recommended.”
--Library Journal

“Elegant . . . alive with carefully observed detail . . . this book’s
excellence is proof as we read it that Potok’s story has a happy ending.”
--The Washington Post

“[Potok] learned to see with words, and judging by Ordinary Daylight, this has saved him. If you read the book, it will save you, too, in ways you didn’t know you needed.”
--The New York Times