Candida Lawrence's Holiday Gift Suggestion

Candida Lawrence is the third author in Unbridled Books' debut season. Fear Itself is the latest memoir from this eighty-year-old writer, considered "a modern American heroine" by Alison Lurie. Like her previous memoirs, Reeling & Writhing and Change of Circumstance, this book was written on a manual typewriter; she owns five in her Mill Valley home, and says "it is too late for [me] to change." The account of her exposure to low-level radiation in the 1940s and its consequences was reviewed last week in South Florida's Sun-Sentinel, where Pat MacEnulty calls it "a timely testament to the importance of skepticism when it comes to governmental reassurances."

After the 2004 election, I was slumped, collapsed in my Slough of Despond when I happened to spot Susan Griffin's The Book of Courtesans: A Catalogue of Their Virtues, long resident on my bedroom shelf. It had not been read because I thought of the author as a serious woman, and how could she possibly have written a book about courtesans? She offers no apology. She showers the reader with intimate and fascinating details about these women through the centuries and does not flinch, never allowing her American Puritan heritage to shadow the narrative. Many of these talented women must have fallen off the ladder down into poverty, illness, death, but the stories of those who held their footing to the end of their lives, in so many different ways--writing, dancing, good investment, holding onto the affection of former lovers, cheering even in old age those who remained their friends--allowed me to imagine that I might have lived in another century, taken different routes to survival, found joy where I’m too much the American female to believe such is possible. Thank you, Susan Griffin.

photo: Emily Hawthorne (full size)