I have a very talented lady here today to tell us all about her new memoir, Fighter Pilot's Daughter. Her name is Mary Lawlor. Enjoy the interview!
First, find out more about Mary and her hot new book...
Mary Lawlor is the 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 at 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.
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.
Can you give us an excerpt?
Yes, sure. Here’s the first page:
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 rotate- 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.
If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would that be?
Be brave! Have confidence in your passion for writing and in your ability and desire to write. Pursue the vision of yourself as a writer and don’t get sidetracked by jobs, relationships, errands, distractions, or anything that takes you away from your work as a writer, even if it means you have some trouble paying the bills for a while.
What would you say is one of your interesting writing quirks?
Interesting question. I have a tendency to explain more than I need to, but fortunately, I also have a good editorial antenna that zeros in on those unnecessary explanations during rewrites and gets rid of them. Maybe it’s a left-over from my years as a professor…
Do you hear from your readers? What do they say?
Yes, I’ve heard lots from the readers of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter. Many have told me how much they resonate with the depictions of life during the later years of the Cold War. It was a time that taught many of us to be fearful of what we didn’t know, of what might be coming tomorrow, and what people in power were doing. It left many of us with a sense of fragility and insecurity, traces of which I think we still live with. I heard from several readers saying they appreciated the story for picturing those things and for sharing my story of shaking myself (somewhat) free of them.
I’ve also heard from several readers who enjoyed the stories of my idiosyncratic mother and my glamorous father. They were larger-than-life characters, and I miss them very much; so it gives me great pleasure to read these comments.
What is the toughest criticism given to you as an author?
Someone once told me I was disrespectful toward my parents and the military as an institution in writing this book. That stabbed me in the heart, mostly because I love my parents and was trying hard in writing the book to sort out the complexities of our relationship and to show how rich and complicated they were as human beings. The last thing I wanted to do was disrespect them. I think the person who said this was too ideologically bound up by the wrong, unthinking kind of patriotism and didn’t get how appreciative I was of my parents—and of the opportunities I had growing up in the Army.
What has been your best accomplishment?
Raising my step-daughter.
Do you Google yourself?
No.
How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have?
Good question! I have one unpublished novel (The Time Keeper’s Room) that’s sitting in my agent’s hands, one half-finished novel (The Stars Over Andalucía) which I’ll take up again later this year, and one I’m working on as we speak (The Translators—A Novel of Medieval Spain).
Fun question – if you were a princess or prince, what’s one thing you would do to make your kingdom a better place?
I’d have everybody vaccinated and boosted and reading books as much as we watch TV!
Do you have anything specific that you would like to say to your readers?
The book I’m working on now, The Translators, is a
historical novel set in Spain in the 1100s. It’s a work of literary-historical fiction, and the central
characters are based on historical figures—a pair of mathematicians,
astronomers, and Arabists working together as translators. I’ve taken what
little we know about these figures (Robert of Ketton and Hermann of Carinthia—they
were the first translators of Muslim religious works, including the Koran, into
Latin) and created a story centered on the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, the
contradictions of medieval spiritualities, and the hazards of love and
friendship.
