The fourth of Candida Lawrence’s stand-alonememoirs, the collection of pieces that is Vanishingreveals a life-long awareness of human fragility andthe constant proximity of alienation and separation.A survivor in the truest sense and a woman withthe greatest personal resilience, Candida Lawrencerecalls what it is to make each day an assertion ofindependence. Her deeply felt remembrancesalways grant us an honest account of what it isto live in this unstable world. And the pieces thatmake up Vanishing are no exception.Vanishing opens with Lawrence’s childhood distrustof men’s use of words and an assertion that shewill ever write only truth. By the second piece inthis volume it comes clear that there is no subjectshe will not address with an eloquent, understatedhonesty that reveals her heart and her mind andher constant resistance to expectation. By the endof this volume what comes clearest is her sensethat modernity has separated us from the most realemotions and the most sensible attachments.As always, Lawrence’s writing is filled with smart,gentle anger, sweet sadness, and the most privatesense of what is vital and important.To read this memoir is not only to know a remarkablewoman; reading all of Lawrence is to see the worldthrough eyes that are unblinking over sixty fiveyears.
