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Ordinary Daylight: Portrait of an Artist Going Blind

Andrew Potok

Bantam Dell, 1980

by: Brian Schumacher

Andrew Potok was a forty-year-old painter when he was diagnosed with an inherited eye disease, retinitis pigmentosa, and told he would go blind. Devastated by this news, he traveled to London to undergo bee-sting therapy in the hopes of staving off blindness. Despite this painful and humiliating therapy, his eyesight worsened. By the end of his autobiography, Potok begins to accept his blindness, the end of his career as a painter, and the advent of a new career as a writer.