{What's On Your Kindle?} Mary Lawlor on Fighter Pilot's Daughter

 

Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War tells the story of Mary Lawlor’s dramatic, roving life as a warrior’s child. A family biography and a young woman’s vision of the Cold War, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter narrates the more than many transfers the family made from Miami to California to Germany as the Cold War demanded. Each chapter describes the workings of this traveling household in a different place and time. The book’s climax takes us to Paris in May ’68, where Mary—until recently a dutiful military daughter—has joined the legendary student demonstrations against among other things, the Vietnam War. Meanwhile her father is flying missions out of Saigon for that very same war. Though they are on opposite sides of the political divide, a surprising reconciliation comes years later.

Fighter Pilot’s Daughter is available at Amazon.

 

 

Mary Lawlor is author of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter (Rowman & Littlefield 2013, paper 2015), Public Native America (Rutgers Univ. Press 2006), and Recalling the Wild (Rutgers Univ. Press, 2000). Her short stories and essays have appeared in Big Bridge and Politics/Letters. She studied the American University in Paris and earned a Ph.D. from New York University. She divides her time between an old farmhouse in Easton, Pennsylvania, and a cabin in the mountains of southern Spain.

You can visit her website at https://www.marylawlor.net/ or connect with her on Twitter or Facebook.

 

 

 

Welcome, Mary! Your memoir, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter, sounds absolutely awesome. Can you tell us the story behind that intriguing title?  

They say memoirs take something out of a writer as past history is retold and sometimes it’s hard to get those feelings out there. After it was written, did you ever have a moment to reflect and almost do a double take on whether you wanted to get your story out there? 

This is a great question and speaks to what was a huge issue for me in writing Fighter Pilot’s Daughter. I was worried about how my sisters would feel about it. I was concerned they might be hurt by the public exposure of some of our less attractive family dynamics (our arguments with each other; our father’s drinking; our mother’s family’s complicated history). And there was always the issue of whether they saw episodes of our past the same way I did. They liked it after all, and I think they were proud of me for it. I’m really grateful to them for that. 

Then there was the issue of what a narrative leaves out. You can’t tell everything in a memoir, or the book would be too long. Lives aren’t narratives. You have to select and cut a lot to put a book together. In that sense, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter felt a little unreal to me, but every time I’ve read it again, I recognize the scenes and know they happened exactly as I described them. 

Was there a part of your book that was harder to write?

The central chapters of the book, when I was in Paris for my first year of college, were difficult to write, although those chapters turned out to be the most dramatic of the book. New people and new ideas came too quickly into my life, and I didn’t have enough preparation for them to know how to respond wisely. I was simply swept away by politics and romance and soon found myself in big trouble with my parents, who, though they didn’t have a lot of resources, were funding me through all of this. I don’t want to give away what happens in the book, but there were dramatic clashes, and we only found our way back to each other much later. I harbored some negative feelings about my parents for years without really investigating those feelings or thinking about my own part in provoking them. The events of those Paris years left emotional scars that were hard to write about in the book, but I learned a great deal about myself and my past in the process. Writing about those times was like self-therapy, and I’m so glad I did it.

What part of your past was fun revisiting?

It was really interesting looking up my parents’ own family backgrounds and finding out more about my grandparents and their antecedents. Both sides of my family came from Ireland, and it was fascinating to dig up the names of my great-great grandparents and to see where they came from in Ireland. Not all of that found its way into the book, but I learned a great deal and enjoyed the research very much.

If there was one thing you wanted people to take away from your book after reading it, what would that be?

I’d like readers to know more about the experiences of military families—all the moves they make and how difficult it can be for the kids to shift from base to base, school to school, old friends to new friends. I also wanted to tell the story of the fear that played such a large role, especially on military bases, in daily life during the Cold War. The threat of nuclear war and the possibility of the Russians overtaking America made us so anxious they colored not just our parents’ speech but our dreams. It’s very strange to see the United States government now drifting into a cloudy friendship with the Russians, for reasons that aren’t explained to us citizens. Most of the parents and grandparents of the readers of this blog would be appalled to know of it. 

In a nutshell, my hopes for the book are expressed at the end of my introductory chapter, titled “The Pilot’s House”: 

My hope is that the pictures of military domestic life here will resonate with people born in the Cold War decades before 1980. And that in my story they will recognize those familiarly strange times—not just the fears but the dark enchantments that kept us down, ducking and covering, for more than forty years. 

What’s next for you?

I’ve just finished a novel which my agent is looking at right now and which I hope will be published next year. It’s called The Translators and centers on a couple of 12^th-century monks who travel from England and Croatia to the north of Spain, where they learn Arabic and find their way into recently conquered Arab libraries. They’re based on historical figures who were astronomers and who really did make the long trip to Spain.  Most of Iberia was Arabic/Berber and Muslim at the time, but the Christian armies of the north were pushing them out, and as they did so, their libraries became available. Those libraries were full of knowledge that Christendom didn’t have. My plot centers on the monks’ efforts to access it, with pressure coming from the Church to stop them. It’s an intriguing drama about a time and a series of discoveries not many people know about.