The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found

By Frank Bruni—Simon and Schuster, 2022

Frank Bruni is an award-winning American journalist and a longtime writer for the New York Times. He awoke one morning to find the vision in his right eye was blurred and he had no idea why. So begins his journey to save his vision and manage the powerful emotions that accompany his prognosis. Bruni learns he has had a stroke that affected his optic nerve—and that his vision might not return. At the same time, his partner takes up with another man, leaving Bruni alone and vulnerable emotionally. To cope, Bruni sets to talking with people who have faced diagnoses of comparable severity, and he learns new skills for coping from them all. While as readers, we may not be losing our eyesight, we are all facing hurdles that come with aging, so we can relate as Bruni writes eloquently about feeling dependent, asking for help and mastering new skills.