Fear Itself by Candida Lawrence
Memoir Hardcover
ISBN: 1-932961-01-1
5 x 7 ¼ /
224 Pages /
$19.95 / October 2004
Summary
The third of Candida Lawrence's stand-alone memoirs, Fear Itself rises from her life-long awareness of human fragility. 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 grants us an honest account of what it is to live in this unstable world. And Fear Itself is no exception.
Fear Itself begins with Lawrence's childhood distrust of "the men who make things." And through its twists and turns, it marks her growing awareness of modernity itself. With a voice that is richly revealing, Lawrence traces her years struggling to have a child and her slow waking to the secrets that governments and institutions withheld from the women of her generation.
Unwittingly exposed to low-level radiation in the 1940s, Lawrence learned somehow to believe herself into wholeness and to survive her disappointments until there was nothing left to fear—but fear, itself. 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 to know a remarkable woman.
Praise
"Candida Lawrence's valuable story, which begins in her childhood, is frightening in its detailed information about the American lives (old & unborn) lost to the secret keepers of the national & corporate nuclear industries." —Grace Paley
[A]timely testament to the importance of skepticism when it comes to governmental reassurances ... vividly hypnotic." —The Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel
"Like Terry Tempest Williams in Refuge (1991), Lawrence reveals with eloquent restraint and galvanizing personal evidence the tragic consequences of the government's reckless mishandling of nuclear materials in the hope that such abominations will never again take place." —Booklist
"A powerful voice of womanhood . . . searching for words to speak her own truth and gradually finding them against incredible inner and outer odds." —Marion Woodman
"Candida Lawrence is a contemporary American heroine." —Alison Lurie
" . . . a graceful, forceful writer." —Phyllis Chesler
"Together, [Reeling & Writhing and Change of Circumstance are] a wow that will leave you moved, jubilant and incensed." —The Women's Review of Books
"... her writing pulls you in ... At 202 pages, and the book's 5"x7" size, it can easily be read in one sitting, and Lawrence makes that even easier with her straightforward writing and interesting story." —Emergingwriters.net
Bio
Candida Lawrence is 80 years old. She would like to write sparkling fiction, but nonfiction is what gets her to the typewriter. She has five manual typewriters, and it is too late for her to change. The author of two previous memoirs—Reeling & Writhing and Change of Circumstance—Candida says that her writing is her biography, all there is. She lives in Mill Valley, California.