Eyes like Mine: A Memoir between Blindness and Sight

Talea Anderson is a person with low vision. Although she passes as sighted, she feels she has a “blind identity.” Eyes like Mine is her candid and revealing memoir detailing her experience grappling with partial vision and the isolation and loneliness that this often brings. Anderson expresses a longing for connection and community, especially with those who live in the space between sight and blindness.

Eyes like Mine examines ideas of disability as Anderson understands the nature of her blindness and sight and how that has evolved over her life. She relates her experiences to historical figures with low or partial vision, including painter Claude Monet, disability advocate Helen Keller, and musician and composer Maria Theresia von Paradis, among others.

Writing eloquently about her surgeries, and others’ efforts to “fix her,” Anderson captures her experience with disability with confidence and self-reflexive humor. Eyes like Mine does not speak for all blind people or others with partial vision. Instead, Anderson investigates how disabled people think about their relationship with disability and how they identify.