The story of the author as a young woman coming of age in an Irish Catholic, military family…
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.
⤷Read sample here.
⤷Fighter Pilot’s Daughter is available at Amazon.
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╰┈➤Book Details
Genre: Memoir
Sub-genre: Women in History / Military Leaders Biography
Language:English
Pages: 323
Paperback ISBN: 978-1442222007
Kindle ISBN: 978-1442222014
Publisher: Rowman and Littlefield
Format: Hardcover, Paperback, Kindle, Audiobook
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✎ᝰ.📓🗒Memoirs
=✪=Military Family
🎖️Life as a Military Brat
🗺️⁀જ✈︎Travel
✌️The Sixties and the Cold War
✈️Fighter Pilots
One spring afternoon I was studying on the deck behind the house. The comprehensive exams at the NYU English department were coming up soon. Between meals, I had been working for hours at a time, reading, taking notes, drafting commentaries. Suddenly Jack appeared with a tray. It was lunch—a sandwich and a glass of juice. He put it on the table next to me. “Here you go, Mame,” he said, a little awkwardly. There was no precedent for this. Grateful and more than a little embar-rassed, I thanked him. The impulse was to repeat the thanks, make amends for this gift, for the fact that I didn’t deserve it. But his gesture put a stop to that. He acknowledged the thanks with a muffled “my pleasure” and went back into the kitchen. The sky was clear that day, a few clouds sailing in from the west. Dip chicks and loons paddled by the dock. The New England spring had colored the foliage across the cove with white, pink, and yellow blossoms. The book on my lap dissolved. I tried to get what this meant, what had just happened. My father had served me lunch. The abundant honor was more than I knew what to do with. One thing was clear. Jack was communicating with me. For communication to hold up, it needed a response, not a look of stunned wonder. Jack’s confrontation with the drinking had brought him in contact with people who suffered in ways he hadn’t imagined. Fishing with Nancy and her family at Truro on Cape Cod one summer day after he’d begun recovery, he felt the need to get to an AA meeting. The nearest one was in Provincetown. He drove the ten miles and found himself surrounded by gay men whose stories were harder than his own. “These fellas,” he began, telling John and me about it later. The three of us were sitting in the television room in Noank. Dad was hunched over, thinking, elbows anchored on his knees, hands clasped. “These fellas had a tough time.” Their hard lives had been made harder by drinking. So had Jack’s. The Provincetown meeting and others in Noank showed my father what deep difficulties of being and identity not only gay men his age and younger had had to negotiate: he saw close up at AA the everyday suffering of people he had only “known” by exotic images and stereotypes: people of color, divorced women, socialists, junkies. And he shared his own stories with them, the strife with Frannie, probably the battle memories. The old warrior had begun to set aside the cartoon notions he’d harbored for so long. Startled by familiar pain, he let the mean images go.
– Excerpted from Fighter Pilot’s Daughter by Mary Lawlor, Rowman and Littlefield, 2013. Reprinted with permission.
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/.
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╰┈➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mary.lawlor.186/
