Title: Fighter Pilot's Daughter
Author: Mary Lawlor
Publisher: Rowman and Littlefield
Pages: 323
Genre: Memoir
Format: Hardcover, Paperback, Kindle, Audiobook
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.
Interview:
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.
Is Fighter Pilot’s Daughter your only book?
No, I’ve published two others, Recalling the Wild (about the end of the frontier in American history and what that meant for writers) and Public Native America (about tribal communities in the US and the museums, powwows and casinos where they invite non-natives to come and learn about them). I’ve also written a novel, The Translators, (set in 12th century Spain) which I hope will be published next year.
Since part of this is about being part of a military family, did you ever tire of all that moving and what locations did you live?
Moving so much was often difficult, and I dreamed of a more stable home, like the one where my cousins lived in the New Jersey countryside. At the same time, moving could be exciting. My sisters and I often looked forward to the new places where we were headed and had fun meeting new kids there. When the kids turned away or the places were dull, I would turn to my imagination for entertainment and for confirmation of my self-worth.
Was it hard to make friends knowing you’d be moving at any moment?
Yes, it was often hard to make friends, but not because we didn’t want to. Instead of base schools, my parents tried whenever possible to enroll us in Catholic schools, where the kids had been together since kindergarten. They knew each other well. They saw my sisters and I as outsiders — clueless and irrelevant. But sometimes we made friends, especially when we got to be a little older. And yes, it would be hard to leave them a year or two later. The experience of meeting new people over and over again meant that we became good at walking into a room, introducing ourselves, and carrying on conversations with strangers. The challenge was in learning how to be a real friend over time, caring for a friend, thinking about them, going through things with them that helped us grow, as real friends do.
What part of the Sixties did you enjoy the most?
What an interesting question. My first thought is the communal sensibility that came with being young in the Sixties. So many of us — strangers to each other, really — identified with the political and cultural breaks from the America of the 1950s. That identification drew us to each other, made us want to understand and experience life together. In cities across the country and elsewhere in the world, you would see young people who you knew shared your views and your efforts to escape the strictures of the Fifties. You could see it in their dress, their speech, their manners. Their hair! It was a wonderful thing to feel that.
What part of the Sixties do you miss now as an adult?
I miss that sense of belonging to something larger than myself and my family, my friends. In some ways, we feel it now, as the demonstrations against the current government seem to be gaining momentum. There’s a shared sense of caring for fellow citizens and for their well-being, a sense of caring that we maintain the safety and prosperity we’ve always known. In that sense, it’s sort of opposite from the Sixties, when we were thinking more about breaking out from safety and prosperity for more adventurous ways of being. Now that I’m older, I see the value of those things and want to protect them!
What part of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter did you enjoy writing about the most
The Paris chapters were the most enjoyable to write. It was great to remember those times. I was a very young woman living in this wonderful, beautiful city, and my eyes were opening to all kinds of new ways of seeing life — to politics, philosophy, sex, rock & roll. As I was writing, I really sank back into those years. This is where the climax of the book takes place, when my father came to “rescue” me from the city I’d come to love. Writing those episodes, I came to see them in a different light and grasped in ways I hadn’t before how difficult the experience was for my Dad as well as for me. I realized how he and my mother struggled with the question of what to do with or for or about me. I wasn’t the only one who was turned upside-down by the conflicts between us. That wasn’t necessarily enjoyable, but it taught me a great deal about myself and those times.
Thank you so much for this interview, Mary. What’s next for you?
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve just finished a novel, The Translators, which my agent is looking at right now. I hope it will be published in the coming year. I’ve also started another novel, this one set in Cádiz, Spain in the 18th century. It’s based on another historical figure, an Irish woman who married a Spanish nobleman and who lived and died in Spain. She was part of an entire emigre society that had left Ireland to escape English persecution. It’s a fascinating story, and I’m looking forward to finishing it.
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.
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.
