The Page 69 Test: *Fighter Pilot's Daughter* by Mary Lawlor #page69

 

 

 

They say if you want to really find a good book, go to page 69 (the middle and meat of the book) and you like what's there, it's definitely worth reading the whole book. For today's feature, I'm zooming in on page 69 of Mary Lawlor's memoir, Fighter Pilot's Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War. 

BOOK DESCRIPTION

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.

The disappointment and the anger, instead of wearing Mom down or leaving her, like her mother, in the stew of depression, toughened her. She sharpened her voice and her posture on Dad’s sins. On top of
Jack’s insults, Mary Ellen Walsh, Frannie’s dear old grandmother, died.
She had been a crucial presence in Mom’s life, a source of security, particularly since her father had left Frankie. With Mary Ellen’s passing, Frannie was more alone than ever. Her statuesque “Grandma” had been a model of strong and gracious femininity. She had helped the family significantly to fashion its Irish Catholic profile as aristocratic and cultured. She had seen the prosperous household creep through the depression with balance and “class.”
Frannie was ready to step into these noble lines. But what she didn’t take from her grandmother was the bosomy, lace trimmed femininity visible in portraits of Mary Ellen. She could have picked up styles like
this from her own mother too, for Frankie was an ultra-feminine, even sexy, beauty. All the charm got her in the end, however, was a nightmare. Philip Walsh had courted her like a prince, set her up in a grand house with a Rolls Royce and polo ponies, made money hand over fist in the stock market; and then he had pulled the rug out from under her feet. No more trips to Paris to buy Worth gowns, no more maids, no parties. No more fancy car or house. No more husband. Frannie had looked around through the steam of misery that followed and seen the survivor was not her mother, but her brother—and the father she devised in a carefully maintained story. After her grandmother, it was these male figures she followed. They could stand up and move like gentlemen through the good times and in danger and want. She would emulate them.
When Jack’s squandering of money on booze and dice started looking like habit, Frannie prepared her attack. She drove to Burdine’s, at the time Miami’s most prestigious store. Skipping the clothes and the
perfume counters, she went straight to the jewelry department where she purchased an exquisite, solid gold, art deco watch with a sapphire crown. The price tag, $700. That was a lot of money in 1955, and Dad
felt it directly when she showed it to him. Turning the snaky thing in the lamp light, she growled in a low, threatening voice, “that’s how you waste good money.”

What do you think? Would you keep reading?

 

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.