Mary
Lawlor grew up in an Army family during the Cold War. Her father was a
decorated fighter pilot who fought in the Pacific during World War II, flew
missions in Korea,
and did two combat tours in Vietnam.
His family followed him from base to base and country to country during his
years of service. Every two or three years, Mary, her three sisters, and her
mother packed up their household and moved. By the time she graduated from high
school, she had attended fourteen different schools. These displacements, plus
her father?s frequent absences and brief, dramatic returns, were part of the
fabric of her childhood, as were the rituals of base life and the adventures of
life abroad.
As
Mary came of age, tensions between the patriotic, Catholic culture of her
upbringing and the values of the sixties counterculture set family life on
fire. While attending the American
College in Paris,
she became involved in the famous student uprisings of May 1968. Facing
her father, then posted in Vietnam,
across a deep political divide, she fought as he had taught her to for a way of
life completely different from his and her mother’s.
Years
of turbulence followed. After working in Germany,
Spain and Japan,
Mary went on to graduate school at NYU, earned a Ph.D. and became a professor
of literature and American Studies at Muhlenberg
College. She has published
three books, Recalling the Wild (Rutgers UP, 2000), Public Native America
(Rutgers UP, 2006), and most recently Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up
in the Sixties and the Cold War (Rowman and Littlefield, September 2013).
She
and her husband spend part of each year on a small farm in the mountains of
southern Spain.
About the Book:
FIGHTER PILOT’S DAUGHTER: GROWING UP IN THE SIXTIES AND THE COLD WAR tells
the story of the author as a young woman coming of age in an Irish Catholic,
military family during the Cold War. Her father, an aviator in the
Marines and later the Army, was transferred more than a dozen times to posts
from Miami to California
and Germany as
the government’s Cold War policies
demanded. For the pilot’s wife and
daughters, 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 book describes the dramas of this traveling
household during the middle years of the Cold War. In the process,
FIGHTER PILOT’S DAUGHTER shows how the larger turmoil of American foreign
policy and the effects of Cold War politics permeated the domestic universe.
The climactic moment of the story takes place in the spring of 1968, when the
author’s father was stationed in Vietnam
and she was attending college in Paris.
Having left the family’s quarters in Heidelberg, Germany the previous
fall, she was still an ingénue; but her strict upbringing had not gone deep
enough to keep her anchored to her parents’ world. When the May riots
broke out in the Latin quarter, she attached myself to
the student leftists and American draft resisters who were throwing
cobblestones at the French police. Getting word of her activities via a Red
Cross telegram delivered on the airfield in Da Nang,
Vietnam, her father came
to Paris to find her. The book
narrates their dramatically contentious meeting and return to the American
military community of Heidelberg.
The book concludes many years later, as the Cold War came to a close.
After decades of tension that made communication all but impossible, the author
and her father reunited. As the chill subsided in the world at large, so
it did in the relationship between the pilot and his daughter. When he died a
few years later, the hard edge between them, like the Cold War stand-off, had
become a distant memory.
For
More Information:
Before you started writing your book, what kind of research
did you do to prepare yourself?
I wanted to structure the “plot” of my family’s life
chronologically, with the focus alternating between the larger picture of the
Cold War, the more intimate dramas of our gypsy household, and the private
convolutions of my own psychological development. These were very different stories, and each
demanded its own kind of research.
For the larger picture of the Cold War, I had, of course,
all kinds of books and articles at my disposal.
Studying multiple histories of the many dimensions and geographies of
the Cold War as a professor had given me a lot of background material for the
book. Still, I had to go further, read
more, think harder, about the particular phases that determined my Dad’s
career. Spending time with the wars of
the twentieth century wasn’t pleasant.
Those are bloody stories for anybody, but for me they brought back
memories of hard times at home. With the
names—Eisenhower, Kennedy, Diem—and the places—Vietnam,
Moscow, Havana—came
recollections of base housing, where we waited for Dad to come home and hoped
he was alright. Apart from the emotional
edginess, though, this kind of research was relatively straightforward.
For the stories of my own family, the sources were more
complicated. First of all, my father had
never told us anything. Like other
military dads then and now, he was committed to a code of secrecy about the
missions he was involved in. He took
those secrets to his grave. And he chose
not share with my sisters and me those episodes he could relate: they were too violent or frightening in some other
way that might shock our young (and girlish) ears. I have reason to think he did tell these
stories to my boy cousins and perhaps to my mother; but she too was very
circumspect and kept them to herself if she knew them.
What I did have from my Dad was a substantial collection of
letters he wrote. They start during his
years in college and in flight school and continue through the later
years. I’m really grateful to my mother
for keeping them and to my sisters, Nancy and Sarah, for letting me hold onto
them for as long as I have. And a lot of
military records ended up in my mother’s files after my Dad passed away. Those provided a crucial map of the very
complicated chronology of his career and definitive, if cryptic, indications of
where he went and what the missions were.
But much was missing nevertheless. My Dad was a good letter writer, but he would
go for long periods of time without communicating anything. During his first tour in Vietnam,
for example, there was a six-month period when we didn’t hear from him at
all. My sisters and I had nightmares and
my mother worried constantly.
Eventually we heard from the Red Cross that he was alright. It was still a while before we heard from him
directly. I describe the effects of all
this on my psyche in the book, but for the purpose of building the narrative it
meant I had to try to sort out the speculative from the factual in family
rumors (still circulating) about where Dad was and what he was doing those
months he was in the dark.
And all the military records aren’t there either. Big gaps fall between years, and much
information about unit missions is absent.
I spent a lot of time trying to get the missing records from the various
US Army and Marine Corps archives. You’d
think this would be pretty straightforward; after all, it’s the military, and
they’re the epitome of organization, right?
But not so. There are a number of
these archives scattered across the country.
Some of them house certain materials, and others different things. Archivists don’t all seem to know which facility
has what. And one of them, a large
storehouse of military records located near St. Louis,
burned down in the 1970s. All those
documents were lost forever.
I should say, though, that those archivists and librarians
who I asked for materials were very helpful and did all they could to steer me
in the right direction. Without their
help, I wouldn’t have had nearly as much information to use to build the
narrative of Dad’s assignments that was the plot of FIGHTER PILOT’S DAUGHTER.
My mother, of course, was another resource for the story of
our family. She was a great story teller. A striking character herself, she gave
dramatic accounts of my Dad, his friends, the extended family, and my sisters
and me as kids. But she was unreliable. She loved the story more than anything, and
the truth sometimes suffered from this.
I interviewed her over a period of several months—this was a few years
before I wrote the memoir—and learned a great deal about our early years that I
hadn’t known before. Much of it turned
out to be accurate. When I checked on
her versions of the larger history and her tales of my Dad’s work, however, I
saw that in some instances she’d picked and chosen scenes and dialogues for
their effectiveness in her story rather than as they had actually
happened. I tried to make that in itself
part of her portrait in Fighter Pilot’s
Daughter—without dishonoring her memory.
For the convolutions of my own psychological development, I
had my girl-diaries, journals, and letters to consult. They brought back some of the crucial details
of daily life in our household and in the scattered rooms and apartments I
called home after leaving my parents’ care.
The smells of particular kinds of paint or the odd placement of
windows—these details can really bring life to a memoir, and I was grateful to
my younger self for having kept a record of them.
But the greater pool of information lay in my memory
banks. These in some cases were wide
open, but in others not so much. For the
harder memories, I had to sit with whatever I could clearly recall and wait for
more to come. Sometimes it took days of
going back and waiting. It was like
courting somebody or, I imagine, being a therapist hoping a patient would come
to see something crucial. Memories of my
mother’s anger at me when I came home from college in Paris
during a time when I was breaking away from the family ethics and beliefs came
slow and with difficulty. What was even
harder to get back was the recollection that finally emerged of her actually fearing me. She didn’t understand what influences I’d
been exposed to in Paris and was
frightened to know what they might mean.
In the end, it was all much ado about nothing, but it was a hard picture
to look at: my own mother, afraid of me.
Living in memory as continuously as I did during the writing
of FIGHTER PILOT’S DAUGHTER introduced a rich practice in my life. The more I remembered, the more I
remembered; and writing was an important
vehicle for drawing it out. I’ve tried
to keep that going in the months since the book first emerged. Not that I’m plotting another memoir (I’ve
turned to fiction now and have a novel ready to go…), but the whole experience
of going into the deep past of my youth has given the self-portrait I carry
around with me a lot more dimension than before. You’d think that somebody who took on the
project of writing a memoir would know a lot about the self being narrated
there. On the other hand, all this the
research—into the histories, letters, journals, interviews, and my own mind—not
only made the book possible, but it worked like a kind of self-therapy: and a
lead to several new understandings of myself as a fighter pilot’s daughter.
Did you pursue publishers or did you opt to self-pub?
I pursued publishers through an agent and was happy to get a
contract with Rowman & Littlefield.
If published by a publisher, what was your deciding factor
in going with them?
Rowman & Littlefield has a reputation for publishing
good memoirs and particularly those set in the second half of the twentieth, so
I felt it was a good choice.
If published by a publisher, are you happy with the price
they chose?
I wasn’t happy at the beginning. I thought it was too
expensive. But the book sold well after it’s first year, so it was reissued
last fall in paperback. The price is much better now. A lot more people have
been buying it in paper (and the kindle sales have gone up to!).
Did you purposefully choose a distinct month to release your
book? Why?
I was happy with the month the publisher chose, September,
because it’s when everyone comes home from summer vacation or summer jobs and
when schools and universities start up again. I wanted it to be a new book
available for that moment.
How did you choose your cover?
The designers at Rowman & Littlefield came up with a few
options, and I chose the one that appears on it now. It has a photo of my
sisters and me wearing our father’s Korean War helmets—it’s an absurd picture
in a way, but I like it very much. I thought it fit the designer’s image quite
well.
Did you write your book, then revise or revise as you went?
I revised as I went and then revised the entire draft
several times. Each day I would start out by re-reading what I’d written the
day before.
What are three of the most important things you believe an
author should do before their book is released?
-Make sure you’re on as many social media platforms as
you’re familiar with;
-Create a website for yourself or update an already existing
one to show the new publication
-Alert as many bookstores and book clubs in your area of the
upcoming release and tell them you’re available for readings & signings.
What are three of the most important things you believe an
author should do after their book is released?
-Sign up for a virtual book tour with Pump Up Your Book!
-Pay attention to your social media
-Spread the word in any way you can
Do you have a long term plan with your book?
I’d love to see it emerge as a screenplay and am learning
how to write one for that reason. It’s a long shot—a really long long shot, but
I’d like to try.
What would you like to say to your readers and fans about
your book?
I’m very happy I wrote it and grateful for the good
reception it’s had.
