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/