Vanishing

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.