Invisible Violets

Winner of the Wandering Aengus Book Award in Nonfiction

Chrys Buckley was born with albinism, which means she has no pigment and she is legally blind. From an early age, she realized that while she was the blind one, it was hard for other people to see her as a real person.

Chrys often felt like a blank white canvas that everyone painted their assumptions about disability and paleness onto, rendering her invisible.

With warmth, compassion, wit, and lyricism, Chrys examines albinism, disability, blindness, synesthesia, dysfunctional relationships, self-betrayal, family discord, true-crime pop culture and true crimes on the smaller stage of our real lives, discrimination in medical education, and the power of words and writing.

This literary mixtape is an exploration of seeing, not seeing, being seen, and not being seen. It’s a reclaiming of the real, particular self that too often gets overlooked and obscured by tropes and projections. Each essay is a love song: to place, to memory, to music across dedades, to books, to science and medicine, to the land and the sea. Underscoring all the stories and contemplations is the steel will of a writer screaming in vivid color to make her flawed individual heart visible.