Search results for ""author candida lawrence""

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.

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In light of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan, the remarkable personal story that comprises Fear Itself becomes a cautionary tale. Unwittingly exposed to low-level radiation in the 1940s, Candida Lawrence has lived courageously with its effects throughout her life. Fear Itself 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. The task for her--and for women who have shared her experience--has always been to believe herself into wholeness and to survive her losses and her illnesses until there is nothing left to fear. As always, Lawrence's writing is filled with smart, gentle anger, sweet sadness and the most private sense of what is vital and important. In Fear Itself, Lawrence's deeply felt remembrances grant us an honest account of what it is to live in an unstable world. It is a truly personal account that sheds wide light on the world's ongoing nuclear decisions. What personal life story could be more timely?

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