CANDIDA LAWRENCE
VANISHING
There is no more revelatory a memoirist at work today than Candida Lawrence. Her three earlier volumes have chronicled her life underground with the two children she snatched from their custodial father and her battle with cancer in a poisoned world. Vanishing is an honest chronological sequence of personal reflections covering all of a singularly uncommon life.
In this new collection Lawrence addresses an array of subjects with an eloquent, understated honesty that reveals her heart and her mind and her resistance to expectation. By the end, what comes clearest in VANISHING is the author’s sense that modernity has separated us from our most real emotions and from 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.
$23.95 US / $28.95 C | Memoir Hardcover | 6x9 | 316 pages
June 2009
ISBN: 978-1-932961-66-9 | Carton Quantity: 24
The rules you must follow for a successful vanishing are few. They must be internalized and never forgotten: Plan ahead. Do not explain your actions to anyone, however innocent. Record and remember document fictions. Do not communicate with friends or relatives by U.S. mail or telephone. Both before and after, maintain appearance of a calm, law-abiding citizen. Do not reveal your history to new friends. There have been instances when I have broken one or a combination of these rules and each time I have felt panic and loss of control. When I lost control, my body twitched and my nights filled with dreams of search, flight, prison. To calm myself, I smiled a lot. Occasionally I had to invent new fictions of surpassing pathos—an alcoholic mother—and then wait to discover the power of fiction. One more rule: Never lie to the children. After you have vanished, they will hear you lie to others (birthdate, place of birth, explanations of father’s whereabouts), but if they know the reasons for your lies they will know history and motive and can fit pieces into the puzzle. You are putting yourself in their power, but you’ve been there all along, haven’t you?
Candida Lawrence is the author of four separate volumes about her own life—Reeling & Writhing, Change of Circumstance, Fear Itself, and Vanishing. She says that her writing is her biography, all there is. She lives in Mill Valley, California, and is Founding Editor of Memoir (and). Author photo by Emily Hawthorne
