What inspired you to write your memoir?
When
I started writing Fighter Pilot’s Daughter, Mad Men was still airing,
and the Cold War was its entire cultural nest. And President Barack
Obama had just signed the New START
Treaty with President Dmitry
Medvedev of Russia. Like START I, signed by the first President Bush and
Mikhail Gorbachev, START II limited the number of nuclear warheads and
missiles in both the US and Russia. It was an effort to bring about a
real end to the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war we’d been living
with since the 1950s (and still are). Memories of my girlhood and
forgotten fears of nuclear apocalypse were running through my brain day
and night.Back
in those days, the fears were abstract as well as tangible. I grew up
in a military family. My father was an aviator. Every two years, in
response to demands from the Defense Department, we packed up all our
cups, plates, sweaters, books, and everything else. The movers would
come and take everything away, and off we’d go, by car, plane, or ship
to the next posting — Florida, Alabama, North Carolina, California,
Germany. By the time I was ready for college, we’d lived in I don’t know
how many places and I’d been to 14 schools.
Outside
our household, the Cold War climate kept fear hovering in the air all
the time. Especially in Germany, we were constantly afraid the Russians
would invade or set off a nuclear weapon. The earth would become a
nightmare of emptiness, loneliness, hunger. Competition for survival
would be vicious.
Through
the years of college, graduate school and my work as a professor of
literature, echoes of that upbringing moved to the background but kept
driving things in the foreground. I moved a lot. I had difficult
relationships with friends and boyfriends. Looking at Mad Men and seeing
Obama sign that treaty, I saw more clearly how the fears and all the
moves of my youth were part of that larger Cold War narrative. I
revisited the photo albums my mother made and studied my father’s
military record. A narrative of my own started taking shape in my head. I
scratched out a draft, then another and another. Writing Fighter Pilot’s
Daughter helped sort out and make sense of the complicated past, not
just of my own life but the bigger picture of those fractious and
difficult years in the life of the nation.
What message do you hope to convey to readers with your book?
I want readers of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter to come away with a deeper understanding
of what military kids and spouses experience. I hope the book will show
people how complicated it is for these dependents (a fraught word, but
it’s the term used in military circles) of service people to maintain
healthy and happy family lives when they have to move all the time and
when they spend long months separated from the father or mother who’s
deployed to war.
The
book is also about our patriotic culture, our many wars, and the
perhaps inevitable reactions of young Americans to a national identity
based on that sort of power projection. I’m thrilled when readers write
to say the book has helped them remember and think about events of the
time and see how much they’ve shaped history since.
I
also have to admit that I’d like my mother and father to be remembered!
They were complicated, fascinating, larger than life people. I suppose a
lot of people can say that about their parents, but mine were hugely so
for me. There are far more stories about them than I was able to
recount in Fighter Pilot’s Daughter; but it makes me
happy to hear from readers that they feel they know Jack and Frannie;
and that they have an idea of what my early life was like. It makes me
feel somewhat less of a stranger everywhere I go.
What was your childhood like?
I’ve
said a lot about this already, but I’ll add here that there was a lot
of tension in our house because of all the moving. Mostly we lived in
military quarters and never had our own home. And my father was away
from home a lot of the time — on a ship off the coast of Guatemala
waiting an invasion to begin, or in northern Turkey investigating a
fly-over of the Soviet border, or somewhere close to the border with
East Germany, keeping tuned to news from the Fulda Gap. In these and
other situations too frightening for my sisters and I to know about, he
kept us in suspense from far away. We were happy when he came home, but
without meaning to, he frightened us. He’d walk through the door, his
head nearly touching the ceiling, his blue eyes lit with a long-distance
gaze. It was like he hadn’t really landed. He had gifts. He told
stories. But he wasn’t really home yet, and we weren’t sure who he was.
Throughout your childhood, and besides your parents, did you have people in your life that stood out and made a difference?
My
Aunt Sandy and Uncle Philip Walsh and their children, my cousins, who
lived in New Jersey were always a model for me of the kind of stability I
always dreamed of. They lived in the same town and the same house until
they were all grown up. They had their complications too, and not
everything went perfectly smoothly as my cousins grew up. But they were
energetic, imaginative people — and there were a lot of them. Their
stability and intelligence meant a lot to me.
If
you were to trade places with your father, how would you change his
perspective on life? Do you see anything you would have liked to change
about him?
My
dad was a decorated war hero. My mother, my sisters and I lived in the
glow and the shadow of his dangerous, turbulent life. Through all our
many moves — I went to 14 schools before I turned seventeen — I remained
a good Catholic, a good patriot, and a good student. But when I came of
age in the late sixties, I turned away from much of what I’d been
taught. Suddenly, the way of life I’d absorbed at Catholic schools and
from uncounted patriotic sermons appeared distant and wrong. And all
that my father had done in the Korean War and was still doing in Vietnam
appeared in a different, darker light.
The
confrontations between my father and me as a result of my involvement
in the Paris demonstrations shattered my ties to the family and marked
my psyche in ways I’ve tried for years to understand better. I was
deeply conflicted about my parents at the time, especially about my dad.
And I didn’t know how I felt or should feel about myself as the
daughter of the man who flew the bombing and strafing missions he did. I
wrote the book both to produce a fuller and more nuanced picture of
those difficult times and to find a way beyond my own anger at parents I
also loved, respected, and missed. Writing Fighter Pilot’s Daughter helped me understand their choices much better than I had in the past.
Will there be a second memoir?
That’s
an interesting question. I think about it from time to time, and one of
these days I might actually sit down and do it. My husband and I live
in Spain half the year and went through a lot buying the property we own
there and building our little house. There are zillions of stories to
tell about those years. It would be interesting to pick up the narrative
from Fighter Pilot’s Daughter and try to connect the different but
related experiences. And, of course, the times we’re living through
right now bring the Cold War back into view, and I’d really like to roll
up my sleeves and write that story too.
Please share what’s next for you?
I’ve just finished a historical novel called The Translators, based
on the lives of two medieval priests who traveled from England and
Croatia, respectively, to northern Spain in the 1140s. They met and
became intimate friends, learned Arabic and translated works in the
libraries that once belonged to the emirs of al-Andalus (what the
southern part of the Iberian Peninsula was called when it was Arab and
Muslim). I’ve fictionalized much of the priests’ lives for the novel but
relied on extensive research on the history of the time. A lot of the
tension in the story arises from the Church’s attitude toward the books
the priests translate for Christians to read. The climax involves the
English priest’s sister, who escapes the chaos of home to meet her
brother in France, where she helps him and his friend overcome their
personal tensions and, indirectly, resolves their struggles with the
Church.
Modern Thrills
Intriguing Historical Details
Secrets That Connect the Past With the Present
High-Stakes Quest
Keeps You Guessing
