J. T. Hill doesn’t want your help. He’d rather walk to town, risking his life at every intersection, instead of asking for a ride. He’d rather make his students call out their questions in class than tell them the truth: He can’t see them raise their hands.

This is the stubborn, hurt young man we meet in “Blind Man’s Bluff,” Hill’s memoir. Hill lost nearly all his sight as a teenager to a condition called Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy. By 16, he’s legally blind, leaving his barely driven Mustang in the driveway. He has some peripheral vision, but it’s a busted kaleidoscope of dulled colors and borderless shapes, “a time-lapsed photograph of a distant galaxy.”

The book focuses on Hill’s years in high school, college and grad school — times when so many of us are desperate to fit in, and then determined to find our own way. Hill struggles on both ends. He can feel his friends slipping away from him, the way the ceiling fan in his bedroom slowly slips from his vision. At one point he and his mom fly to Japan for a possible cure not approved by the F.D.A. As they walked around Tokyo, he says, “we were lost even when we knew where we were.”

His whole life feels like that.

He can pass for sighted, and wants to. He wants to be a writer so he churns out short stories, jacking up his fonts to MARS ATTACKS headline size. He stacks his shelves with paperbacks he listened to on tape. He walks without a cane. He shows up early for dates and meetings so people have to look for him instead of the other way around. (As a fat guy, I always show up early, too. It’s a small bit of control over a world that can feel like one big trap.)

Hill plans his days at a level deeper than most of us ever have to think about. As a teenager he memorizes the track listings on his favorite CDs and the buttons on his microwave. As he gets older he finds that his ideal apartment is not just close to work and connected by sidewalks; it’s also near a minimart where he can buy canned soup and chips without having to go to the grocery store. He hates the grocery store. He has bitter arguments there with multiple girlfriends over the years. He’s mad because they get tired of reading labels to him. They’re mad because they ask him what cookies he wants, and all he can come up with is something vague like, “Do they have anything with peanut butter?”

Hill sketches these scenes in a spare, fuss-free way. The emotions hit late, a little behind the beat, providing a jolt of surprise as well as drama. He’s funny in the same backhanded way; you can see how he ends up with that string of girlfriends.

But Hill also writes like someone who has spent too much time in his own head. Most of the book is in first-person, but sometimes Hill falls into second-person detached, as if he got tired of being near his own story. He jumps time and place in a way that can be hard to follow. He writes a novel featuring professional wrestling and a character modeled on Prince, but he never says why he loves professional wrestling or Prince. He leaves out simple details in a way that can be maddening. At one point he mentions going to college in his home state of West Virginia. A little later he reveals that the college is in the town of Buckhannon. But he never just says the name of the damn school. (It’s West Virginia Wesleyan.)

This absence of detail extends to most of the people in the book. His first college girlfriend — the first woman he’s ever kissed — shows up on Page 62 and is gone a few pages later, returning only in brief flashbacks. (You find out later that he dumped her at least partly because she started listening to Hootie and the Blowfish.) Even Meredith, the woman he marries, is a bit of a question mark. Here’s what I remembered about her after closing the book: She has long hair, watches a lot of TV and one day she comes home wanting a divorce.

I wonder if Hill left some of the shadings out on purpose — not just to protect people (he changes some names and identifiers), but to give the reader a sense of how he has to process the world. His eyes won’t let him get a clear look at people — there’s no magical sixth sense he acquires once his sight is gone. What he’s left with is a life of turning his head at odd angles to catch whatever fragments he can see.

That skewed vision also applies to himself. It’s hard to get the tone of a memoir right — too easy on yourself and it sounds like boasting, too hard and the reader wonders why anybody would spend time with you. It feels as if Hill leaned on Option 2. He comes off as a jerk for much of the book, too stoic to open up to the people who care about him, too hardheaded to make life easier for himself.

Underneath it all is a lingering, irrational, terrifying thought: “Everything happens for a reason, people liked to tell you when your vision began to go. You wanted to believe them, but there’s a fine line between looking for a reason and blaming yourself for going blind.” He knows it makes no sense that his blindness is anything but cold fate. But he still wonders if he deserves misery. And so he spends much of the book pushing people away, cutting them off before they probe too deep. He makes you understand why he does it, but that doesn’t make it easier on the people around him.

Hill finally stumbles toward a happy ending and it seems rushed; at first it felt to me as if Hill were racing to meet a deadline. But maybe it’s the natural reaction of someone who doesn’t trust happiness yet.

When Hill first goes blind, he has to listen to books one at a time on a heavy, clunky tape player. By the end of his memoir, he can put every book he owns — and all his music, too — into a device the size of a deck of cards. His world got bigger as it got smaller. And as he says goodbye, despite all his flaws, you root for him to hold on to the little bit of joy he’s found — the colors in his life, for once, sharp and bright.