New West Book Review

Disappearing Act: Candida Lawrence’s “Vanishing”

By Jenny Shank, 6-21-09

Vanishing
by Candida Lawrence
275 pages, $23.95

Candida Lawrence’s new Vanishing is a collection of incisive, chronologically arranged personal essays that plunge the reader into vivid moments of her past, beginning in 1942 when Candida is in college at Berkeley and is a reporter for the Daily Cal, and extending into recent times, when she is coping with aging and adjusting to a changed world.  Like Mary Gordon, Lawrence writes with great candor, wit, and intelligence about her family.  Lawrence lives in Mill Valley, California, and is the author of three previous memoirs.  As she reveals in one of the most arresting pieces in the book, “Vanishing: 1965,” Lawrence spent years hiding out under an assumed identity after she took off with her children in the wake of a messy divorce which had left her with very limited visitation rights.  This is perhaps why, as revelatory as these essays are, they still bear an air of mystery.

Lawrence writes bracing prose, mainly in present tense, replete with precise detail; the effect of this approach is that the reader feels as though sitting right beside her in 1965 when she flies to San Diego with $500 for an abortion in Mexico.  “We rent a 1965 Ford Sedan, blue with a white interior, AM-FM radio, and a clock that works,” she writes.  “I sit primly on the dazzling vinyl and feel small.” In Tijuana, they wait in a parking lot for a station wagon that comes to take women to a clinic.  Lawrence’s descriptions of the people with her on that ride provide a cross section of women in the same situation:

“To my right is Black Woman, calm, dignified.  Next to Black Woman is a young girl…dressed in faded jeans…Her eyes are red from recent weeping and seem about to spill over again.  Facing Young Girl on the bench opposite, is an older woman in a light-blue pants suit…I would have guessed her to be too old for this trip, but perhaps she has similar thoughts about me.”

In “Vanishing: 1965” Lawrence lists the rules she followed to escape notice when she took off with her children, such as “Record and remember document fictions,” “Do not communicate with friends or relatives by U.S. mail or telephone,” and “Both before and after, maintain appearance of a calm, law-abiding citizen.” The desperation she must have been driven to in order to take these actions is palpable, as is the anxiety she lived under, going as far as refraining from checking out travel books at the public library for fear someone would figure out where she was going. 

She first chose to hide out in Tucson.  “A mistake,” she writes, “and one I had the sense enough to rectify after two weeks.  107 degrees.  No public kindergartens.” Risky as her actions were, it appears she got away with it.  “The children and I left town in a borrowed car at the end of August 1965,” she writes.  “I turned the radio dial to all stations as we covered the miles.  Each station gave out news of the Watts Riot in L.A.  There was no news of a vanishing woman.”

Other exceptional pieces in Vanishing include “We’re All in This Together: A Memoir,” a novella-length essay about her parents’ “slow decline” that reminded me of Mary Gordon’s moving Circling My Mother: A Memoir.  “What Raymond Carver and I Talk About…"—in which Lawrence imagines she is speaking with Carver about the Robert Altman film “Short Cuts” that was derived from Carver’s stories—is great fun.  In “Mutuality” she writes about her long-term domestic relationship, an essay that is funny and touching in its crisp observations of mundane activity. “Long ago she told him that she doesn’t like to perform acts which she has to undo and then do again a few hours later,” she writes, “which reminds her of years of housewifery when she felt herself to be inside a film which went forward then backward, then forward again.”

And in “…Gone, All Gone,” Lawrence writes about a conversation with a friend who confesses his addiction to strip clubs.  At the beginning of the book, Lawrence was the brazen one, flouting conventions for her gender and time, but by the end, she’s almost prim: “Often lately I feel I’ve been on earth too long, far past understanding many of the adjustments, the new ways boys and girls, men and women, get to know each other.  Blowing, undulating.  E-mail.  Chat rooms.”

Lawrence’s writing is admirably to-the-point and in-the-moment, unpadded by backstory, and most of what the reader needs to know about the characters and situations is contained within each essay.  Still, the jumps in time in the book leave many questions.  Is the man named Jack who escorts Candida to Mexico to have an abortion the same year she later absconds with her children the same Jack who turns up much later in the books?  She seems to be raising her children alone, so did they stay together the entire time?  How did Lawrence get away with taking her children?  Could there be legal repercussions from revealing this now?  A couple of accounts of her dreams are puzzling because the reader isn’t sufficiently grounded in Lawrence’s current experience at the time the dreams take place.

Many of these questions are probably answered in Lawrence’s other books, but readers of only Vanishing will be left curious.  And because the writing in Vanishing is so sharp, most will want to check out Lawrence’s previous books to discover the answers.

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