New Self-Help! The Life-Changing Power of One Question by Holly Hurd

 

One Powerful Question Can Change Your Life

One Powerful Question Can Change Your Life.

In this empowering guide for women, Holly Hurd explores the transformative power of asking the right question at the right moment to unlock self-worth, confidence, and clarity.

Whether you’re navigating personal crossroads or professional change, this book will guide you to the breakthrough you’ve been seeking. With stories, prompts, and real-life examples from women who have radically changed their lives, this book reveals how a single, thoughtful question—posed to yourself or others—can help you find purpose, deepen relationships, and create connection. A former hedge fund founder turned women’s empowerment advocate, Holly Hurd combines business acumen with emotional insight to offer listeners a framework for self-reflection, personal growth, and bold action.

This book isn’t just about finding the right words—it’s about discovering your voice. Through guided inquiry and inspiring anecdotes, listeners will learn how to identify the question that could open the door to healing, opportunity, or reinvention. Whether it’s a whisper of curiosity or a cry for change, asking that one question may be the first step to a more courageous, connected, and fulfilled life.

Inside, you’ll find:

• Empowering questions to ask in moments of doubt, change, or opportunity
• Real stories from women who found clarity and purpose by asking just one question
• Simple yet powerful tools for reconnecting to your intuition and taking the next step

If you liked How Successful People Think, Supercommunicators, or How to Become a People Magnet, then you’ll love The Life-Changing Power of One Question.

The Life-Changing Power of One Question is available at Amazon.

╰┈➤Book Details 

🔥Title: The Life-Changing Power of One Question: Unlock Purpose, Direction & Connection with One Powerful Ask

🔥Author: Holly Hurd

🔥Genre: Personal Growth

🔥Sub-genre: Women’s Empowerment

🔥Language:English

🔥Pages: 236

🔥Paperback ISBN: 978-1969508141

🔥Publisher: Maison Vero

🔥Publication Date: November 25, 2025

Excerpt:

PROLOGUE

What is the question that changed your life? It’s there. At first, many people struggle to pinpoint their question. But if you reflect deeply, you’ll likely uncover one—or even several—questions that have altered the course of your life in meaningful ways.

Each of us has experienced moments where a single question has led to a new path, a significant decision, or a profound shift in perspective. Maybe it was a question you asked yourself in a moment of self-doubt or clarity. Perhaps you turned to someone else for advice, and their answer illuminated a path you hadn’t considered. Or maybe you reached out to the universe, asking for a sign to guide you in an uncertain time. Whether the impact was fleeting or long-lasting, the power of that question remains undeniable.

My theory is that a question can help you take the next step. By asking thought provoking questions, we can find a way to the other side and a happier life. As women, we have spent our entire lives taking care of others, now it’s time to ask: What makes me happy? What do I want out of my life? Is there something I really want to do? How do I want to spend my life?

I’ve spent the last fifteen years interviewing women at inflection points in their lives. Maybe they were recently widowed or divorced. Maybe they were new empty nesters. Perhaps their parent has passed, or they lost a job or retired. There are so many transitions that can be difficult to walk through. These women found a way to move forward by asking a question that led to a business, venture or pursuit. You may not be looking to start a business but rather begin a different lifestyle after an inflection point.  Regardless of where you are, I believe questions can lead you to what’s next.

Why write this book? In my life recently I’ve noticed what makes me happy, what makes me smile, what gives me fulfilment, and what gives me peace. Connecting with other people is my answer.  And recent studies have shown it’s important to everyone and everyone’s health. Three recent studies and countless research articles have shown that connecting to the people in your world brings happiness. In fact, studies have shown that connecting with other people leads to a longer healthier life. Given that, connecting with others should definitely be on your health to-do list.  This book will show you how questions help you connect and find your happiness.

Let me be clear: I don’t claim to have all the answers to the questions you may ask yourself or others. I am not a therapist, psychologist, or psychiatrist. If you are facing challenges such as anxiety, depression, or other mental health concerns, I encourage you to seek the guidance of a licensed professional. This book is not intended to diagnose or treat mental health conditions. Instead, it is an exploration of how the right questions—asked with intention and clarity—can serve as powerful tools for growth, connection, and transformation.

Through extensive research and reflection, I’ve gathered insights from experts in communication, relationships, and personal development. My goal is to share their wisdom and offer a framework for uncovering the questions that can lead to greater happiness and fulfillment in your life.

I’m not a scholar or teacher but I believe happiness is the ultimate currency.  Our world just went through a period of extreme disconnectedness, and we are at a major point of dividedness in our world. How do we get back to connectiveness and ultimately, more happiness? A question can give you that connectiveness and change your life and the lives of those around you, maybe only for a moment, maybe for a little while and maybe for a lifetime.

In your daily life, people want to connect and to be seen. How easy is it to connect? Something as simple as saying “It’s busy today, right?” “Quiet in here today?” “So cold outside, right?” It can be anything that gets the person to see you and lets them know you see them. Rather than just go through the motions of checking out, picking up your order, or walking to your desk, you can turn your workday or errand into an exchange that improves your health.

And in your personal life, whether in your relationship with others or your relationship with yourself, questions are amazing at getting you to examine where you are, where you want to go, and how you want to live your life. You will see examples of multiple stories throughout the book where questions led others to happiness You can use these questions to guide you to a clearer picture of what makes you happy and ultimately begin a journey to a happier life.

Your relationship with your boss, your employee, your partner, your mate, your parents, your friends, your child can all be improved with a single question. In this book you’ll learn what question to ask, and you’ll learn how to ask that question to work towards a better relationship with everyone you encounter and everyone you know - leading to your happiness. 

Here’s my promise to you, my reader: by the end of this book, you’ll discover the value of asking the right questions—not just of others, but of yourself. You’ll learn how to start a meaningful conversation with a question that could spark change. You’ll identify the life-changing question you need to ask yourself right now. Whether you’re seeking a new career, a deeper purpose, stronger relationships, or greater overall joy, one well-chosen question could be the key that unlocks it all.

So, let’s begin this journey together. Let’s uncover the life-changing question that’s waiting to guide you toward your next chapter.

– Excerpted from The Life-Changing Power of One Question by Holly Hurd, Maison Vero, 2025. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author

For the last 15 years, Holly Hurd has interviewed and profiled hundreds of women entrepreneurs through her platform VentureMom.com. This gives her unique insights into how women create successful ventures from scratch. Her website serves as a source of inspiration and guidance, showcasing stories of women who turned ideas into thriving pursites and businesses.

Holly’s first book, VentureMom: From Idea to Income in Just 12 Weeks, became a bestseller, offering readers a step-by-step blueprint to start a business in a short period of time. Now, her highly anticipated new book, The Life-Changing Power of One Question, will draw on her experience with women who are at inflection points This book explores how asking the right question at the right time can transform lives. Aimed at women at pivotal moments, it serves as a powerful guide for those seeking to redefine their happiness and create a fulfilling new chapter.

Holly began her career managing her own hedge fund at just 23 years old, specializing in futures and commodities trading. This experience sharpened her strategic mindset and entrepreneurial spirit, ultimately leading her to her true mission: empowering women to lead happier, more fulfilled lives.

Visit her website at VentureMom.com.

Connect with her on social media at:

╰┈➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VentureMom/

╰┈➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/venture_mom

╰┈➤ LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/hollyhurd/

Sponsored By:

 

🏰 {BOOK TRAILER} SHE FORGOT SHE WAS FREE BY GISELLE MASCARENHAS

 

BOOK DETAILS

She Forgot She Was Free is an invitation to remember the woman you were before fear, expectations, achievement, disappointment, and survival convinced you to forget.

In this deeply personal and transformational book, two-time best-selling author and founder of The BECOME Method™, Giselle Mascarenhas, shares the lessons, questions, and revelations that led her back to her truest self. Rather than offering quick fixes or another self-help checklist, she invites readers into a journey of honest reflection, identity, healing, and intentional growth. Through compelling stories and practical insights, readers are challenged to release limiting beliefs, reconnect with their authentic voice, and rediscover the freedom that has been within them all along.

Rooted in the principles of The BECOME Method™, She Forgot She Was Free equips readers with a powerful way to move beyond simply surviving and begin living with clarity, courage, and purpose. Whether you’re navigating a season of transition, rebuilding after loss, or simply sensing there is more waiting for you, this book will remind you that the life you long for doesn’t begin by becoming someone new, it begins by remembering who you have always been.

Because the person you are searching for has never been lost.

She has simply been waiting for you to remember her.

╰┈➤Book Details 

● Title: She Forgot She Was Free
● Author: Giselle Mascarenhas
● Genre: Self Help
● Sub-genre: Inner Child Self Help/Transformational Self Help/Motivational Self Help
● Language:English
● Pages: 132
● Paperback ISBN: ‎ 979-8234125965
● ASIN: B0H6M1PSHT
● Publisher: Mija Media House
● Publication Date: June 23, 2026
● Price: Hardcover $37.99, Paperback $25.81, Kindle $9.99
● Amazon: https://a.co/d/04aiKYWO
● Purchase Signed Copy: https://signedcopy.netlify.app/

 

 

About Giselle Mascarenhas

Giselle Mascarenhas is the founder of BECOME™, creator of the BECOME Methodology™, and author of She Forgot She Was Free. An entrepreneur, speaker, and transformational guide, she has dedicated her life’s work to helping people reconnect with who they were created to be so they can live with greater purpose, freedom, and intentionality.

After years of building businesses, leading organizations, and walking through seasons of personal growth, Giselle recognized that lasting transformation does not begin with external success, it begins with remembering one’s authentic identity. That realization became the foundation of the BECOME Method™, a proprietary methodology designed to guide individuals through a transformational process of self-awareness, healing, alignment, courageous action, and embodied growth. Unlike a framework that offers guidelines for achieving a specific outcome, The BECOME Method™ is a comprehensive method of personal advancement that can be applied across every area of life, leadership, and purpose.

Her debut book, She Forgot She Was Free, is both a deeply personal memoir and an invitation for readers to embark on their own journey of remembrance. Through honest storytelling, reflection, and faith, the book explores the universal experience of losing ourselves beneath expectations, fear, pain, and performance, and the courageous journey of rediscovering the freedom, identity, and purpose that have always existed within us. Rather than simply telling her story, Giselle invites readers to see themselves in its pages and begin writing the next chapter of their own lives.

The book became the catalyst for the broader BECOME movement, an expanding ecosystem of transformational experiences designed to help people move beyond inspiration into intentional action. Through immersive workshops, retreats, leadership development, educational programs, community experiences, publishing initiatives, and speaking engagements, Giselle equips individuals with practical tools to create meaningful and lasting transformation. Every experience is grounded in the belief that personal growth is not about becoming someone different but remembering and embodying the person God uniquely created each of us to be.

Known for her ability to blend heartfelt storytelling with practical application, Giselle creates spaces where people feel seen, challenged, and empowered to take meaningful action. Her presentations combine vulnerability, strategic thinking, and actionable guidance, allowing audiences to leave not only inspired but equipped with a clear path forward. Her work resonates with entrepreneurs, leaders, professionals, educators, faith-based communities, and individuals seeking deeper purpose and authentic fulfillment.

Beyond her work as an author and speaker, Giselle is passionate about developing leaders who create ripple effects within their families, businesses, organizations, and communities. She believes transformation is contagious, that when one person remembers who they are and chooses to live courageously, they give others permission to do the same. This philosophy continues to shape every initiative within the BECOME movement.

Through future books, collaborative publishing projects, leadership academies, retreats, and global speaking engagements, Giselle’s mission is to help millions of people reconnect with their God-given identity and become the fullest expression of who they were created to be. She envisions BECOME as a worldwide movement that empowers individuals to live intentionally, lead authentically, and create lasting impact for generations to come.

Giselle lives in Texas with her family and continues to write, teach, speak, and expand the global reach of the BECOME movement. Whether on stage, in the pages of a book, or through transformational experiences, her message remains the same: the person you are searching for has never been lost, you have simply forgotten who you are. Remember. Rise. BECOME.

Visit her website at www.thebecomemethod.com.

Connect with her on social media at:

╰┈➤Twitter: https://x.com/giselleempowers

╰┈➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/giselleempowers

╰┈➤Instagram: https://instagram.com/giselleempowers

╰┈➤Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/21957760.Giselle_Mascarenhas

 

Guest Post: 5 Things You Should Know About Fighter Pilot's Daughter by Mary Lawlor

 

Our guest today is Mary Lawlor, author of Fighter Pilot's Daughter. She is here to talk about her latest memoir. Be sure to check out her book, Fighter Pilot's Daughter!

5 Things You Should Know About Fighter Pilot's Daughter

By Mary Lawlor

1. It’s a true story—an account of my life as one of four daughters in an Irish-American, Catholic, military family.

 Fighter Pilot’s Daughter is one of the few works of non-fiction about a specific military family and one of even fewer that situates the experience of military family life on base and all the moving within the larger picture of the late Cold War. 

2. The plot of the book follows the moves we made at the behest of the Marine Corps and Army. And we moved a lot –on average once every two years.

3. Fighter Pilot’s Daughter is my first book of non-academic writing. I spent many years as an English professor and published a couple of academic books. This was my first venture into making a story about my own, personal experience. It was a very exciting and very frightening thing to do. I had no idea if I could pull it off but was thrilled to see that I could.

4. Some readers have wondered how my sisters, who have a central role in Fighter Pilot’s Daughter, reacted to the book. Well before publication, I gave them the manuscript to read. I wanted to know if there was anything they objected to so we could talk about it and work out potential issues. But they were very supportive and didn’t complain about anything—none of the complicated pictures of our family the book conveys, including our father’s alcoholism. I’ve been very grateful for that support and wouldn’t feel right about the book if they hadn’t seen it before it came out.

5. Fighter Pilot’s Daughter is one of the few works of non-fiction about a specific military family and one of even fewer that situates the experience of military family life on base and all the moving within the larger picture of the late Cold War. 

Mary Lawlor is author of a memoir, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War (Bloomsbury 2015) and two books of cultural criticism, Recalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the American West (Rutgers UP 2000) and Public Native America (Rutgers UP 2006). She studied at the American University in Paris, the University of Maryland, and New York University. She divides her time between Easton, Pennsylvania and Gaucin, Spain. Her novel, The Translators, is set in 12th century Spain and fictionalizes the experiences of Robert of Ketton, first translator of the Koran into Latin. She hopes to see it out next year. In the meantime, she has started a second novel, The Women’s Hospital, set in 18th century Spain and inspired by the life story of an Irish woman whose family moved to Cádiz, escaping English oppression in their own country.

╰┈➤ You can visit her website at https://www.marylawlor.net/.

Connect with her on social media at:

╰┈➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mary.lawlor.186/ 

New Memoir! FROM CAMDEN TO KATHMANDU by Bruce Berlin

 

FROM CAMDEN TO KATHMANDU: YOU DON'T HAVE TO KNOW WHERE YOU'RE GOING TO GET TO WHERE YOU WANT TO BE
Bruce Berlin
Memoir

190 Pages

Our Time Books

Publication Date: October 2. 2025

Formats: Paperback, Kindle 

ISBN: 978-0996623223

Price: Paperback $18.00, Kindle $2.99, FREE with Kindle Unlimited 

In 1972, Bruce Berlin — a young poverty lawyer from Camden, New Jersey — set off on a journey with no clear destination. What began as a restless escape became one of the most formative adventures of his life. Traveling overland through Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan at a time when those borders were still open to wanderers, Berlin found himself riding across the Afghan desert in the back of a truck with armed men and their rugs, navigating a world that would soon be transformed by war.

In India, something shifted. Visits to the sacred Buddhist sites of Bodh Gaya and Sarnath planted a seed. Then, in Kathmandu, a chance encounter with former law school classmates led Berlin to a month-long Tibetan Buddhist retreat at Kopan Monastery — an experience he would later describe as perhaps the most important month of his life. Guided by Lama Yeshe and Thubten Zopa Rinpoche, Berlin began a practice that would sustain him for the next fifty years.

From Camden to Kathmandu is a memoir about following the open road before you know where it’s going — and discovering that the destination finds you. Written with the documentary authenticity of real letters sent home, it is the story of a restless young man’s transformation into a meditator, activist, and lifelong seeker.

 

I am in a remote Afghan village on market day. Hundreds of rifle-bearing men on white horses dressed in white robes and turbans surround me. Our vehicle is the only one in this tiny, nameless place in the middle of nowhere. We stopped here for lunch on the second day of a three-day trek through the high desert from Herat to Mazar-i-Shariff in northern Afghanistan. For most of the journey, we haven't even been riding on a road, just following tracks in the desert.

– Excerpted from From Camden to Kathmandu by Bruce Berlin, Our Time Books, 2025. Reprinted with permission.

Bruce Berlin has been a Buddhist meditator for over fifty years, beginning in the spring of 1973 when he spent a month training with Thubten Zopa Rinpoche and Lama Yeshe at Kopan Monastery outside Kathmandu. He began his legal career at the Legal Aid Society in Trenton, New Jersey, later practicing poverty law at Western Massachusetts Legal Services. A former US Institute of Peace Fellow, he cofounded and directed New Mexicans for a Bilateral Nuclear Freeze and created The Trinity Forum for International Security and Conflict Resolution. He later founded New Mexicans for Money Out of Politics and spent eight years as a senior attorney with the New Mexico Public Education Department. He is the author of Breaking Big Money’s Grip on America and resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

➢Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bruce.berlin.5

➢Substack: https://openroadopenheart.substack.com/ 

 

🏰 Author Interview Featuring Mary Lawlor, Author of 'Fighter Pilot's Daughter'

 

Mary Lawlor is author of a memoir, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War (Bloomsbury 2015) and two books of cultural criticism, Recalling the Wild: Naturalism and the Closing of the American West (Rutgers UP 2000) and Public Native America (Rutgers UP 2006). She studied at the American University in Paris, the University of Maryland, and New York University. She divides her time between Easton, Pennsylvania and Gaucin, Spain. Her novel, The Translators, is set in 12th century Spain and fictionalizes the experiences of Robert of Ketton, first translator of the Koran into Latin. She hopes to see it out next year. In the meantime, she has started a second novel, The Women’s Hospital, set in 18th century Spain and inspired by the life story of an Irish woman whose family moved to Cádiz, escaping English oppression in their own country.

╰┈➤ You can visit her website at https://www.marylawlor.net/.

Connect with her on social media at:

╰┈➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mary.lawlor.186/ 

Thank you so much for this interview, Mary. How did your family feel about having you write a book that might include them?

My parents were both gone by the time I wrote Fighter Pilot’s Daughter, and one of my older sisters had passed away. I was worried about how my other two sisters and the larger, extended family would feel about my describing intimate dynamics in the book, like my parents’ fighting or my father’s alcoholism. But my sisters and I talked about these things, and they were supportive. Before publication, I sent them both the finished manuscript — not promising to make changes but to hear their feedback and be influenced or not by it. I know one of them has read the entire book, and she was very moved. Her response has meant the world to me.

What was it like living in military quarters and never having a ‘real’ home that stayed in the same place? Do you feel it shaped who you are today?

In some ways, it wasn’t so much of an issue, since from the time we were very young, my sisters and I were moving every two years or so. It was all we knew and all we expected. The other kids on the Army posts where we were stationed had the same experience.

But a couple of things complicated that normality. Whenever they could, my parents enrolled us in Catholic schools, off post, and we would find ourselves surrounded by kids who had known each other since kindergarten. Generally, they looked at us like we were irrelevant — at least at the beginning. Eventually we’d make friends and be invited to their homes, where we’d see the continuity and stability of their lives, in contrast to our own.

And there were the visits to see our New Jersey cousins, who lived in a lovely house in a country town where they’d been all their lives. They’d gone to the same school, had the same friends, and so forth. It was an ideal domestic scene, and I loved being there. I was envious of their world but couldn’t imagine it for myself. It was too far out of reach.

When we were young, the moves were exciting. My parents would talk about the places we were going — California! Germany! — and my sisters and I would start imaging what they would be like. We’d read about and picture ourselves in the new situation. As we got older and had close friends and boyfriends, the moves were more difficult. It was sad and painful to have to leave, and we wished very much we could stay in the same place. Then, again, the new place would be exciting and different. We’d make new friends, and the cycle would continue like that.

Moving so much and not having a home has shaped me a great deal. After leaving my parents for college, I kept moving and am still am not quite rooted, although I’m married and have a nice house in Easton, Pennsylvania. But every three months my husband and I shift off to Spain, where we have a cabin in the mountains of Andalucía. I love being in Spain and would move here if I could. We have friends and more of a history here than we do in Easton. We don’t, however, have residency in Spain, so after three months, we come back to Easton. The year is divided up like this, and it feels perfectly familiar to me.

In one of your interviews you said, “Memories of my girlhood and forgotten fears of nuclear apocalypse were running through my brain day and night.” I can’t imagine the fear. Can you elaborate on this and tell us how you coped?

Living on military posts, I think we had more of a sense of the potential for nuclear war than other children in America. Because our fathers’ jobs were to get the defense apparatus ready for that eventuality, we were made constantly aware of it. Civil-defense shelters were everywhere, and we practiced the “Duck and Cover” moves at school, huddling under our desks and hoping that would do the trick! On the posts in Heidelberg and Stuttgart, Germany, there was a lot of talk about the Fulda Gap, a point on the border between West and East Germany where it was predicted the Soviet army would flood through to do battle with the Germans and the rest of Europe. These images and warnings kept the possibility of nuclear apocalypse in our minds almost all the time.

Apart from that, our parents were practicing Catholics, and the story of St. John’s Apocalypse often came up in the post chaplain’s sermons. Apocalypse offered a ready analogue to the talk of nuclear annihilation, and the chaplain would build on it, trying to imbue in us a sense of how close the end of world might be. The terrifying judgement of the living and the dead and the assignment of eternal damnation or happiness was always upon us.

These twin discourses of apocalypse were in the air, in our dreams and produced what I’d call a habit of fear, a trained response to seeing whatever troubling situation emerges as a sign of the end of days. Or the end of something. Like now, so many people my age are seeing the current political situation in the US as signs of the end of democracy and, perhaps, of America. But on a more personal level, the habit of fear has stayed with me and been a real handicap to my self-development and to my ability to genuinely live with confidence. Fortunately, it’s an obvious enough problem that I’ve known about it for a long time and have spent a lot of time (and money!) trying to come to terms with and manage it in therapeutical contexts.

Can you tell us the name of some of the places you have traveled to when your father was an aviator and which were your favorite?

We lived in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, infamous as a cancer hot-spot for people who lived there in the 50s. Then there was Fort Rucker, in Dothan Alabama, where my father taught pilots how to fly helicopters and I got to ride in a Bell helicopter once — like being up in the air inside a giant eyeball. We rented a farm way out in the country and had a horse, cows, chickens, guinea hens to look after. That was hugely fun, although rural Alabama was a very unfamiliar place and the people there weren’t easy for us — especially for my mother — to understand. I go into Franny’s way of responding to southern culture in the book, but suffice it to say here that she was quite unhappy. Later we moved to Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia, where we lived off post in a swampy development called Forestdale. There was a creek behind the house, but you had to watch out for water moccasins. I started my writing career there with a little newspaper a friend and I created, The Forestdale Gazette, in which we reported news of the neighborhood, using carbon paper for copies.

Later we moved to Fort Ord, in Monterey, California. This was really my favorite and my sisters’ too. We lived on post, but our parents enrolled us in the beautiful Carmel Mission School in Carmel, situated in an old monastery and arranged like a cloister walk around a gorgeous garden. We made friends there and loved the school, although some of the nuns were stricter than others. We stayed at Fort Ord long enough for my older sisters and me to start high school in Monterey. Then my father had orders to go to Stuttgart, so we had to say goodbye to people who had become important to us.

We crossed the Atlantic on the SS United States, an adventure in itself, which I also recount in the book. Germany opened up a whole new world. The enormous differences of language, styles of dress and manners, of what kids were allowed to do that they weren’t in the US and vice-versa, not to speak of the economic differences between them and us in those days — all these surprises were overwhelming. But it was fascinating. I scrambled to learn the German language and understand the few German friends I made. For the first couple of years we were in Stuttgart, a beautiful industrial city, and then we moved to Heidelberg, a handsome and historic university town. In both places we lived in the very closed environment of the post and didn’t get to know German people or their language or society very well. Among the military kids, my sisters and I came of age and got a taste of American teenage life that we’d never had in the States — drinking parties in the local Gasthauses that had no drinking age, and moonlit adventures in old Nazi sites. It was a strange and exotic experience which made me into a very different person than I’d been before.

Having lived through the Cold War, you know the fear of Russians invading or setting off a nuclear weapon was very real. Can you help us feel what that was like?

We were shown films in school with images of an enormous blast, followed by empty streets with trash blowing in the nuclear wind. The announcer would insist again and again that if we heard the atomic warning siren, we were to “duck and cover,” wherever we were. And we were told there might be no warning, that a blast as bright as the sun would suddenly happen, anywhere, anytime. Duck and cover movies warnings were played in schools and in the base movie theaters. Readiness warnings were issued at sports events and even in church. Repeatedly, we were told to be always alert for the warnings or the sun-bright blast itself. The message was meant to live in our psyches and be part of our thinking, our identity. We were people under threat. Nuclear holocaust was in my dreams and fueled a steady sense of fear and trepidation. From one moment to the next, you had to be ready for the world to fall apart under your feet. It was a tremendously unsettling discourse and kept all of us, I think, on edge and fearful.

I see this now in hindsight as a terrible experience for a child. Whatever the actual threat level at any given moment, ducking and covering probably wouldn’t have helped much. It only left us with a habit of fear. It probably made some of us more philosophical or religiously-minded than we might otherwise have been, given the end-of-the-world scenario we lived with all the time; but I think the more general effect was a fear, bordering on neurosis, of what could happen from one moment to the next. No wonder the late counter-culture that followed saw such an explosion of liberation and care-lessness, to counteract the intense, imposed caution of our childhood years.

In an earlier interview, you said you just wanted your mother and father to be remembered. Can you tell us what you would like people to know about them?

I think Jack and Franny were in some ways typical of their generation. Born in the 20s, they lived through the depression and came of age in the second World War. They weren’t subtle but saw things in black and white terms; and were very clear with their comments about everything from politics to homemaking. In many ways, I think they thought of themselves as opposite to the communists who they considered the enemy: communists were subtle, cagey, didn’t put their cards on the table. You couldn’t trust people like that, since what you saw wasn’t necessarily what you got.

Jack and Franny were both larger than life for me, but others outside the family responded to them as if they too saw them as striking characters. They were outspoken and definitive in their opinions. They were both loud and ready for an argument. I never heard them identify themselves as such, but they were politically independent and would size up the candidates carefully, then decide which was the better man (it was always, of course, a man). And once decided, that was it. There was little room for dialogic discussion of things, much less changing their minds.

As parents, they could be very difficult. They were strict, demanding, and kept a close eye on my sisters and I. They weren’t alone: child-rearing was like that in those days. Kids got spanked, and nobody thought it was wrong. My parents set the rules and the tone for our household, and we followed. There was no consulting us as to what we thought or hoped for or worried about.

But they were affectionate, and we knew they loved us. They hugged us a lot and always made a big deal of our birthdays. Christmas was a huge celebration with lots of good presents. And Jack and Franny were fun. Our moves across the country were always treated like adventures. The hotels, the pancake breakfasts at roadside restaurants, the sites along the routes of America — Carlsbad Caverns, Route 66, the Rocky Mountains — were part of a great expedition we were making. They inspired us with their excitement.

At a certain level, I suppose it’s simple vanity: I want them to be remembered because they meant so much to me. But they both contributed something to the world they came of age in, and they were characters of that time. I think that’s worth remembering.

What would you like future readers of your book to know?

I’d like future readers to know what life was like in the middle-to-late years of the twentieth century, particularly for the children of military families, a generally little understood component of American society. The focus of attention to US forces fighting overseas and preparing for war at home is usually on the service members themselves — all their adventures and sacrifices. I’d like readers to know more about the people who came along with them, followed in their wake — the spouses and children of the warriors. They may well not share the warrior’s priorities or even their ideology, but the children in particular are called on to be part of the picture anyway, like camp followers of all ages everywhere. I’d like people to know more about what life was like for us in our time, but I also hope readers will see how military children still experience the difficulties of moving all the time and the instability of life in warrior society. It’s an age-old portrait and one that’s little understood.