Aloof: On Seeing Less than You Should is a work of personal and linguistic excavation — part memoir, part theory, part love letter to the strangers who have been doing his visual work for him his entire life without knowing it. David Gramling was born with ocular albinism, a condition that means the world comes into focus only at close range, long after most people have already made their assessments and moved on. Over fifty years, this invisible visual illiteracy generated an elaborate set of social adaptations — aloofness mistaken for arrogance, intimacy that arrived precipitously, language pressed into service as a substitute for sight. Aloof is the account of unlearning those adaptations at fifty, and discovering what was there all along underneath them.

Forthcoming.