Vanishing - Hardcover

Lawrence, Candida

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1932961666 ISBN 13: 9781932961669

Publisher: Unbridled Books, 2009

Synopsis

The fourth of Candida Lawrence’s stand-alone
memoirs, the collection of pieces that is Vanishing
reveals a life-long awareness of human fragility and
the constant proximity of alienation and separation.
A survivor in the truest sense and a woman with
the greatest personal resilience, Candida Lawrence
recalls what it is to make each day an assertion of
independence. Her deeply felt remembrances
always grant us an honest account of what it is
to live in this unstable world. And the pieces that
make up Vanishing are no exception.
Vanishing opens with Lawrence’s childhood distrust
of men’s use of words and an assertion that she
will ever write only truth. By the second piece in
this volume it comes clear that there is no subject
she will not address with an eloquent, understated
honesty that reveals her heart and her mind and
her constant resistance to expectation. By the end
of this volume what comes clearest is her sense
that modernity has separated us from the most real
emotions and the most sensible attachments.
As always, Lawrence’s writing is filled with smart,
gentle anger, sweet sadness, and the most private
sense of what is vital and important.
To read this memoir is not only to know a remarkable
woman; reading all of Lawrence is to see the world
through eyes that are unblinking over sixty five
years.

About this title

About the Author:

Candida Lawrence works with five manual typewriters, and it is too late for her to change. The author of three previous memoirs Reeling & Writhing, Change of Circumstance, and Fear Itself she says that her writing is her biography, all there is. She lives in Mill Valley, California, and is founding editor of Memoir (and).

From Booklist:

A brave and unrestrained memoirist, Lawrence continues to shine a contemplative, mirrorlike light on those seminal relationships and transformative events that have perennially defined her world. Nothing is off-limits: not her witness-protection-like abduction of her children following a bitter divorce, not her soul-stirring journey to Mexico in the 1970s for an illegal abortion, not the dolorous objectivity with which she faces her elderly parents’ demise. Throw in the ravages of breast cancer, the vagaries of life as an unmarried woman, and the indignities of old age, and one comes to view the gamut of the feminine experience through the prism of Lawrence’s penetrating eye. Lessons are learned, yet the tone is never preachy. Rather, there is a well-earned cognizance, a cool equanimity that, when tempered with a glint of steely anger, gives Lawrence’s memoir its pensive authenticity. Grounded with a fierce transparency in which secrets play no part, Lawrence’s forthright and graceful memoir is  reflective and determined. --Carol Haggas

About this edition

• Publisher: Unbridled Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1932961666
• ISBN 13: 9781932961669
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 316