Close your eyes is how the description opens, which is a strange instruction to hand a listener and an entirely deliberate one. This audiobook is a memoir written and read by Molly Burke, diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa as a child in Toronto and completely sightless by her teens. Three hours and five minutes is the whole of it, start to finish. The publisher field reads Audible Originals, the release date is August 1, 2019, and the author's name sits in the narrator slot as well as on the cover, easily the most consequential detail this listing holds.
The Ordinary Vanity of Someone Who Cannot Check
What keeps this from becoming a standard-issue inspiration memoir is the refusal of the sober register. Burke describes herself, through the copy, as a purple-haired and pink-obsessed fashion and makeup lover navigating a seeing world, and that framing does more work than any argument could. Bullying and anxiety are here, along with a quest for inclusivity and the construction of a business, but so is the ordinary vanity of somebody who cares a great deal how she looks and cannot check. The best passages sit exactly on that contradiction.
Playing It Anywhere, Tears Shed Along the Way
One five-star arrived knowing nothing about her at all, having simply encountered the title while browsing, and stayed for the account of sight disappearing gradually after years of having it. That response describes brutal honesty about fear, family, friends, accomplishment and the bullying years, then reports subscribing to her channel afterwards. Conversion of that kind is a fair measure of what a short memoir manages in a single listen.
Portability is part of the appeal and one July 2021 account puts it well, describing playing the book anywhere and using it to fill a day of driving, with tears shed along the way. The whole arc lands in one sitting, and a memoir this compressed cannot afford the slack stretches longer celebrity books use to reach a page count. Everything included had to earn its place, which is why the book moves between a childhood diagnosis, a school hallway and an airport security line without ever feeling like it is filling time.
The Copy Calls Gallop the True Star
The most useful reframing comes from a September 2019 response, which suggests you could easily treat the blindness as a background detail, since the main theme is that life gets difficult and you are as strong as she is. That is a generous reading and an accurate one. It also explains why this reaches well past the shelf it sits on: the specifics are about sight loss, and the shape underneath is about deciding who you are while other people decide for you.
Career mechanics get more room than almost any memoir in this category allows them. Burke built an audience the copy pegs at more than 1.8 million followers, and the book treats that construction as a subject rather than as a credential. Anybody curious about how a creator career actually gets assembled will find the mechanics discussed openly, without the false modesty that usually surrounds the topic.
Gallop deserves the billing the publisher hands out. The copy calls the service dog the true star of this audio, and the travel material is the most concretely informative stretch in the book for a listener who has never had to think about airports, hotels or restaurants from that angle. It is also where the humor concentrates, which is not an accident.
Voiced and Directed by Molly Burke
One January 2020 response headed its praise with a credit that appears in no field here, describing the book as voiced and directed by Molly Burke, and calling it a book by her, for her and about her. Direction is a real job, and this record holds no slot for it at all. A listener inferring it from the recording is making a reasonable guess about how a first-person memoir this personal was shaped, and it is the sort of role that vanishes from a credit block precisely when the author is doing it.
Self-narration is the whole production story and the page tells almost none of it. Writing credit and reading credit belong to the same person, and no line anywhere describes how a sightless author worked through the script. On most memoirs that would be a footnote. Here it is the first question a curious buyer asks, and the listing leaves it open, which is a missed opportunity given how much of this book concerns exactly that kind of practical adaptation.
Two smaller things are worth flagging. An accompanying PDF is promised, reachable in your library through a web browser, and the note never says what the document holds, so treat it as an unknown quantity until you own it. The follower figure in the copy was written in the summer of 2019 and has stayed frozen there ever since, which on a book about a career in progress makes the sales text read older than the story does.
Every Written Response Here Is a Five-Star
A July 2020 account identifies the audience precisely: this is a memoir about growing up disabled, moving through bullying and loss toward self-acceptance, and it speaks directly to anyone living with a degenerative condition while working as a call to action for everyone else. Teenagers are the obvious fit. So are families absorbing a new diagnosis, listeners who follow creator careers, and anybody who wants real emotional weight inside an afternoon.
Investigative writing about disability policy is not the register here, and readers wanting systemic analysis or statistics should look to a different shelf entirely. Anyone after a long, chronological life story told from a distance will find something shorter, closer and more informal. Worth knowing too that every written response on this page is a five-star, so a buyer hunting for dissent before committing will have to make the call unaided. Uniformity like that usually means a small, self-selected audience rather than a consensus, and a commitment this short means the risk barely registers.
