At a consultation in April, 2006, the specialist tested her for lupus and porphyria, both of which can cause extreme light sensitivity. Several months later, wearing protective clothing and a face mask fashioned at home from red satin, she took the train to London and visited a dermatologist, who referred her to a specialist in photosensitivity.

In her book, Lyndsey acknowledges that she was asking “for more than a house room.” She was “asking him to help me interact with the outside world, and to burden himself with a girlfriend who is rapidly becoming a freak.” In June, 2005, Lyndsey asked her boyfriend of two years if she could move into his house, in the county of Hampshire, forty miles southwest of London. It mitigates, but does not remove, the pain.” I have taken to wearing my straw hat and a long cotton scarf draped around my neck that I can hold up over the lower part of my face.

to go for a walk towards evening, occasionally I make it to the shops, at other times any of these activities causes horrible burning that lasts for hours. . . . Sometimes the curtains need to stay shut, sometimes it is O.K. In a memoir published last year by Doubleday, “Girl in the Dark,” she writes of this period, “The sensitivity seems to change at random, making it hard to establish how much I can tolerate, and how bright. She never returned to work.Īnna Lyndsey is a pseudonym. A few weeks later, on vacation in Northumberland, her face began burning up in moderate sunlight. Soon afterward, Lyndsey told her manager that she had become sensitive to light, and was granted medical leave. Since the room had no natural light and no computer screens, she concluded that, this time, fluorescent light was the culprit. One day, she was summoned to a meeting in a conference room, and her face began roasting again. Lyndsey had risen quickly through the civil service, and worked in the ministry’s main office building, in Central London. Lyndsey, who was thirty-three, thought that she had no time to be sick: she generated policy for government ministers, and there was an upcoming general election, making her workload particularly heavy. She bought a desk fan and attempted to ignore her discomfort. It felt, she has written, like someone was attacking her with a flamethrower. In the spring of 2005, Anna Lyndsey was looking at her computer screen at the Department for Work and Pensions, a British government ministry, when her face began to burn.

In a 2015 memoir, Lyndsey wrote that exposure to natural and artificial light had made her “burn with invisible fire.” Illustration by Eiko Ojala

The Kurdish Bike by Alesa Lightbourne