Change of Circumstance

Lawrence's 1994 autobiography, Reeling & Writhing, told of her failed marriage and of a heartbreaking custody battle she lost to an apparently sadistic husband. Her subsequent kidnapping of her two young children provides the material for this next volume, an elegantly down-to-earth account of a new life under assumed identities. With a forthrightness applied equally to her cancer and mastectomy, her unconventional alliances with even less conventional men, and her struggle to get teacher certification using false documents and doctored transcripts, Lawrence describes what it's like to ``look like lots of other people'' while having a $3000 bounty on your head. Lawrence is indeed candid (she had already chosen her name when she discovered that it was best known as a vaginal yeast infection). She is also a loving mother to children who manage to adapt as easily to a scorching Tucson motel room as to a house in Southern California. Readers may well wish that Lawrence devoted more of her book to the psychology of life underground, for her scattered musings on how easy it became to tell lies and on her momentary curiosity as to whether acquiring a Social Security card and driver's license under a fictitious name constitutes mail fraud are provocative but never substantive. Still, her way of integrating letters, official documents, journal entries and an imagined chorus of approving as well as disapproving voices into her frank, personal narrative makes for an engaging, accessible story. (May)