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.
