Fighter Pilot’s Daughter by Mary Lawlor
Published by Rowman and Littlefield
Pages: 323
Genre: Memoir
Fighter Pilot's Daughter tells the story of the author as a young woman coming of age in an Irish Catholic, military family. Her father, an aviator in the Marines and later the Army, was transferred more than a dozen times to posts from Miami to California to Germany as the government demanded. For her mother and sisters, each move meant a complete upheaval of ordinary life. The car was sold, bank accounts closed, and of course one school after another was left behind. Friends and later boyfriends lined up in memory as a series of temporary attachments. The story highlights the tensions of personalities inside this traveling household and the pressures American foreign policy placed on the Lawlors’ fragile domestic universe.
The climax happens when the author’s father, stationed in southeast Asia while she’s attending college in Paris, gets word that she’s caught up in political demonstrations in the streets of the Left Bank. It turns out her strict upbringing had not gone deep enough to keep her anchored to her parents’ world. Her father gets emergency leave and comes to Paris to find her. The book narrates their dramatically contentious meeting and the journey to the family’s home-of-the-moment in the American military community of Heidelberg, Germany. The book concludes many years later, after decades of tension that had made communication all but impossible. Finally, the pilot and his daughter reunite. When he died a few years later, the hard edge between them had become a distant memory.
Fighter Pilot’s Daughter is available at Amazon.
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Here’s what readers are saying about Fighter Pilot’s Daughter!
“Mary Lawlor's memoir, Fighter Pilot's Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War, is terrifically written. The experience of living in a military family is beautifully brought to life. This memoir shows the pressures on families in the sixties, the fears of the Cold War, and also the love that families had that helped them get through those times, with many ups and downs. It's a story that all of us who are old enough can relate to, whether we were involved or not. The book is so well written. Mary Lawlor shares a story that needs to be written, and she tells it very well.”―The Jordan Rich Show
“Mary Lawlor, in her brilliantly realized memoir, articulates what accountants would call a soft cost, the cost that dependents of career military personnel pay, which is the feeling of never belonging to the specific piece of real estate called home. . . . [T]he real story is Lawlor and her father, who is ensconced despite their ongoing conflict in Lawlor’s pantheon of Catholic saints and Irish presidents, a perfect metaphor for coming of age at a time when rebelling was all about rebelling against the paternalistic society of Cold War America.”―Stars and Stripes
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Interview with Mary Lawlor
Can you tell us a little about yourself?
While I was growing up, my father was transferred every two or three years, so I ended up attending fourteen different schools by the time I went to college. Eventually I went to graduate school, became a literature professor, and held the same job teaching at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania for many years before I published Fighter Pilot’s Daughter. My job gave me a much stronger sense of stability and self-worth than I’d had when I was younger. Most recently, I’ve been writing fiction and have just finished a novel called The Translators. My husband and I have a little house in Spain and have spent a lot of time studying Spanish history. The Translators is set in Spain in the 1100s and is based on a couple of historical figures — people who, like me, came to live here, learned the language, and found a deeper sense of identity, even as foreigners, than they had at home.
Can you tell us about your latest book, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter?
Fighter Pilot’s Daughter tells the story of my peripatetic family during the Cold War years and the1960s. Since my father flew for the US Marine Corps and later the Army, he had to move wherever they told him to, following the needs and priorities of US foreign policy. That meant my mother and sisters and I had to move with him. The book narrates those shifts of our household across the US and to Europe. The climactic moment takes place in Paris, where I was attending college and demonstrating against the war my father was fighting. In the aftermath, we found our way back to each other and were reconciled by the time he passed away.
How long have you been writing?
I’ve been writing ever since I started graduate school. I thought that period of my life would be brief and that, once I’d studied enough literature I’d be prepared to write fiction. But my MA led to a PhD and then I was offered a job teaching literature. I published two books of cultural studies (Recalling the Wild and Public Native America, both with Rutgers University Press). Many years later, I finally started to write creative non-fiction with Fighter Pilot’s Daughter.
Where do you write?
When I’m in the US, I often write in a sunny family room that’s away from the center of the house. I also have a study on the top floor, which is very nice, but not insulated—so I’m limited to fall and spring there, when the weather isn’t too hot or cold. In Spain I have my own, tiny house, apart from the “bigger” house (it’s also small), and that’s a wonderful place to write.
Do you write every day?
Yes! I miss some days when traveling or errands demand too much time, but I do everything I can to make sure I get some time to write every day. It’s important to do that and helps me and most writers I know stay connected and focused on their work.
What was the road to publishing like?
It was hard, and I had more than a few rejections; but my agent found me a good publisher in the end.
What advice would you give to a first time writer?
Keep at it every day. Listen to the words that sail through your mind, however briefly or dimly. They’re worth listening to and using. Remember doubt is part of the process: don’t let it stop you or get you down.
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Excerpt
The pilot’s house where I grew up was mostly a women’s world. There were five of us. We had the place to ourselves most of the time. My mother made the big decisions—where we went to school, which bank to keep our money in. She had to decide these things often because we moved every couple of years. The house is thus a figure of speech, a way of thinking about a long series of small, cement dwellings we occupied as one fictional home.
It was my father, however, who turned the wheel, his job that rotated us to so many different places. He was an aviator, first in the Marines, later in the Army. When he came home from his extended absences—missions, they were called—the rooms shrank around him. There wasn’t enough air. We didn’t breathe as freely as we did when he was gone, not because he was mean or demanding but because we worshipped him. Like satellites my sisters and I orbited him at a distance, waiting for the chance to come closer, to show him things we’d made, accept gifts, hear his stories. My mother wasn’t at the center of things anymore. She hovered, maneuvered, arranged, corrected. She was first lady, the dame in waiting. He was the center point of our circle, a flier, a winged sentry who spent most of his time far up over our heads. When he was home, the house was definitely his.
These were the early years of the Cold War. It was a time of vivid fears, pictured nowadays in photos of kids hunkered under their school desks. My sisters and I did that. The phrase “air raid drill” rang hard—the double-A sound a cold, metallic twang, ending with ill. It meant rehearsal for a time when you might get burnt by the air you breathed.
Every day we heard practice rounds of artillery fire and ordinance on the near horizon. We knew what all this training was for. It was to keep the world from ending. Our father was one of many dads who sweat at soldierly labor, part of an arsenal kept at the ready to scare off nuclear annihilation of life on earth. When we lived on post, my sisters and I saw uniformed men marching in straight lines everywhere. This was readiness, the soldiers rehearsing against Armageddon. The rectangular buildings where the commissary, the PX, the bowling alley, and beauty shop were housed had fallout shelters in the basements, marked with black and yellow wheels, the civil defense insignia. Our dad would often leave home for several days on maneuvers, readiness exercises in which he and other men played war games designed to match the visions of big generals and political men. Visions of how a Russian air and ground attack would happen. They had to be ready for it.
A clipped, nervous rhythm kept time on military bases. It was as if you needed to move efficiently to keep up with things, to be ready yourself, even if you were just a kid. We were chased by the feeling that life as we knew it could change in an hour.
This was the posture. On your mark, get set. But there was no go. It was a policy of meaningful waiting. Meaningful because it was the waiting itself that counted—where you did it, how many of the necessities you had, how long you could keep it up. Imagining long, sunless days with nothing to do but wait for an all-clear sign or for the threatening, consonant-heavy sounds of a foreign language overhead, I taught myself to pray hard.
– Excerpted from Fighter Pilot’s Daughter by Mary Lawlor, Rowman and Littlefield, 2013. Reprinted with permission.
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About the author
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 Facebook.
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