Mary Lawlor is the 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 at 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.
Thanks for this interview, Mary. Congratulations on your new book! Would you say it’s been a rocky road for you in regards to getting your book written and published or pretty much smooth sailing? Can you tell us about your journey?
I was lucky to have a good agent, Neil Salkind. Once he’d arranged the contract with my publisher, Rowman & Littlefield, everything seemed settled quickly and easily. But then there was a shake-up at R & L, and a year went by without any movement on the actual publication. They’d been very good with editing and generous with the advance, and I had hoped they’d make good on the contract and publish soon; so I didn’t want to push or bother them too much. I was just at the point of calling my editor and complaining when word came they were going ahead with it. Since then, things have gone pretty well.
When not writing, what do you like to do for relaxation and/or fun?
I like to swim. Several times a week I do laps at the Lafayette
College pool near my house (or I did until Covid intensified this fall). I also
like to walk in the hills behind my house. They’re steep, so I get a good
workout going up and down, up and down.
My husband and I live half the year in southern Spain. There
I do the same, swim, and hike in the wonderful mountains of the Serranía de
Ronda. And we travel with friends from our village to the many beautiful cities
of Andalucía—Ronda, Jerez, Sevilla, Córdoba, Granada.
Of course, like most writers, I’m an avid reader. I always have a stack of books I’m reading at the same time—a novel, some book of history, and lately something on astronomy (for a novel I’m writing).
What makes your book stand out from the rest?
Fighter Pilot’s Daughter is one of the few works of non-fiction about a specific military family that situates the experience of life on base and all the moving within the larger picture of the time.
Can you give us the very first page of your book so that we can get a glimpse inside?
Sure. Here it is:
The pilot’s house where I grew up was mostly a
women’s world. There were five of us. We had the place to ourselves most of the
time. My mother made the big decisions—where we went to school, which bank to
keep our money in. She had to decide these things often because we moved every
couple of years. The house is thus a figure of speech, a way of thinking about
a long series of small, cement dwellings we occupied as one fictional home.
It was my father, however, who turned the wheel, his job that rotated us to so many different places. He was an aviator, first in the Marines, later in the Army. When he came home from his extended absences—missions, they were called—the rooms shrank around him. There wasn’t enough air. We didn’t breathe as freely as we did when he was gone, not because he was mean or demanding but because we worshipped him. Like satellites my sisters and I orbited him at a dis- stance, waiting for the chance to come closer, to show him things we’d made, accept gifts, hear his stories. My mother wasn’t at the center of things anymore. She hovered, maneuvered, arranged, corrected. She was the first lady, the dame in waiting. He was the center point of our circle, a flier, a winged sentry who spent most of his time far up over our heads. When he was home, the house was definitely his.
If your book was put in the holiday section of the store, what holiday would that be and why?
Interesting question. Maybe it would be the Fourth of July since Fighter Pilot’s Daughter is centered especially on the American experience of the late Cold War years. The focus is on our family, but our life together is set in that context, with all the good, the bad, and the ironies American culture as the frame.
Would you consider turning your book into a series or has that already been done?
Since it’s a very specific story with a particular ending, I’d have to think long and hard about how to make it into a series. One of my sisters married a military man and has spent her adult life doing what we did as kids—moving and shifting to new environments regularly. That could be the basis of a new book, but her family’s life developed during a different era. The Cold War came to an end early on in her marriage, and a different cultural era started emerging. It would be a very different story. In any case, she would have to tell that story herself.
When you were young, did you ever see writing as a career or a full-time profession?
Yes! From the time I was in first grade, I wanted to write. I was fascinated with language from the beginning and always wanted to make up stories. By the time I entered graduate school I’d fallen in love with literature and was wringing my hands over whether to go into English literary studies, a field that would get me a job as a professor, or creative writing, which would leave me hoping and grasping for any kind of work I could find. If I were lucky I’d get a book published, and then if I were even luckier, it would make some money! I ended up doing both. I opted for English literary studies, became a professor, and wrote when I wasn’t teaching. I’ve since stopped teaching and am finally pursuing writing as a full-time profession.
What’s next for you?
I’m finishing a novel titled The Translators, set in Spain in the 1100s. It’s a work of literary-historical fiction, and the central characters are based on historical figures—a pair of mathematicians, astronomers, and Arabists working together as translators. I’ve taken what little we know about these figures (Robert of Ketton and Hermann of Carinthia—they were the first translators of Muslim religious works, including the Koran, into Latin) and created a story centered on the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, the contradictions of medieval spiritualities, and the hazards of love and friendship.
When
The Translators is finally in the hands of its publisher, I’ll take up a
novel I left off a few years ago. It’s also set in Spain but in our own time.
It’s called The Stars Over Andalucía and centers on an American woman in
her forties who’s trying to make a life for herself in a small village in Andalucía. It starts out somewhat autobiographical but then develops its own
life, and the story becomes entirely different from my own.
FIGHTER PILOT’S DAUGHTER tells the story of the author as a young woman coming of age in an Irish Catholic, military family. Her father, an aviator in the Marines and later the Army, was transferred more than a dozen times to posts from Miami to California to Germany as the government demanded. For her mother
and sisters, each move meant a complete upheaval of ordinary life. The car was sold, bank accounts closed, and of course one school after another was left behind. Friends and later boyfriends lined up in memory as a series of temporary attachments. The story highlights the tensions of personalities inside this traveling household and the pressures American foreign policy placed on the Lawlors’ fragile domestic universe.
The climax happens when the author’s father, stationed in southeast Asia while she’s attending college in Paris, gets word that she’s caught up in political demonstrations in the streets of the Left Bank. It turns out her strict upbringing had not gone deep enough to keep her anchored to her parents’ world. Her father gets emergency leave and comes to Paris to find her. The book narrates their dramatically contentious meeting and the journey to the family’s home-of-the-moment in the American military community of Heidelberg, Germany. The book concludes many years later, after decades of tension that had made communication all but impossible. Finally, the pilot and his daughter reunite. When he died a few years later, the hard edge between them had become a distant memory.
Praise
Mary Lawlor’s memoir, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War, is terrifically written. The experience of living in a military family is beautifully brought to life. This memoir shows the pressures on families in the sixties, the fears of the Cold War, and also the love that families had that helped them get through those times, with many ups and downs. It’s a story that all of us who are old enough can relate to, whether we were involved or not. The book is so well written. Mary Lawlor shares a story that needs to be written, and she tells it very well. ― The Jordan Rich Show
Mary Lawlor, in her brilliantly realized memoir, articulates what accountants would call a soft cost, the cost that dependents of career military personnel pay, which is the feeling of never belonging to the specific piece of real estate called home. . . . [T]he real story is Lawlor and her father, who is ensconced despite their ongoing conflict in Lawlor’s pantheon of Catholic saints and Irish presidents, a perfect metaphor for coming of age at a time when rebelling was all about rebelling against the paternalistic society of Cold War America. ― Stars and Stripes
Fighter Pilot’s Daughter. . . is a candid and splendidly-written account of a young woman caught in the political turmoil of the ’60s and the domestic turmoil that percolated around a John Wayne figure who won the Distinguished Flying Cross, eight Air Medals and the Cross of Gallantry across three generations of starspangled blood and guts. … Among the triumphs of the book is Lawlor’s ability to transition from academic – she is the author of two scholarly books and numerous articles about American literature and culture – to popular writing. ‘I tried very hard to keep my academic voice out of the book,’ said Lawlor, who will be retiring as a professor and director of American Studies after the spring semester. ‘In academic writing, you explain and explain and footnote and footnote, and some of the life inevitably comes out of it. I wanted this to have life.’ In so many ways it does….[particularizing] her family, including her mother, Frannie, her older twin sisters (Nancy and Lizzie) and a younger sister (Sarah). . . . In many ways the Lawlor women drive her narrative. … Her principal focus, inevitably, is her Fighter Pilot Father, who, in her words, ‘seemed too large and wild for the house.’ Jack Lawlor was so true to fighter-pilot form as to be an archetype, hard-drinking, hard-to-please, sometimes (though not always) hard-of-heart. Mary does not spare those details.’ ― Muhlenberg: The Magazine
This engrossing memoir adeptly weaves the author’s account of growing up in a military family in the United States and Europe with domestic American and international Cold War events. Mary Lawlor’s descriptions of her parents’ origins and aging, and her perceptive, honest reflections on childhood and young adulthood between the 1950s and 1970s, are illuminated by the knowledge and wisdom that develop over decades of adulthood. In re-visiting her earlier life, the author reveals a process of arriving at a compassionate understanding of the significant people in it—relatives, friends, nuns, boyfriends, and draft resisters, among others—and through this, a clearer understanding of one’s self. She demonstrates that comprehension of the broad historical context in which one lives—in her case, the pervasive global rivalry between communism and anticommunism, and its influences on American ideals about family roles, political values, and aspirations, which she questioned and challenged as a young woman drawn into the counterculture—is crucial for attaining such self-knowledge.
— Donna Alvah, Associate Professor and Margaret Vilas Chair of US History, St. Lawrence University
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