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.
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Interview
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.
