Today I'm pleased to have Mary Lawlor on the blog to talk about her memoir and what it took to chronicle such an important time.
A personal narrative braided with scholarly, retrospective reflections as to what that narrative means, Fighter Pilot's Daughter zooms in on a little girl with a childhood full of instability, frustration and unanswered questions such that her struggles in growth, her struggles, her yearnings and eventual successes exemplify those of her entire generation.
From California to Georgia to Germany, Lawlor’s family was stationed in parts of the world that few are able to experience at so young an age, but being a child of military parents has never been easy. She neatly outlines the unique challenges an upbringing without roots presents someone struggling to come to terms with a world at war, and a home in constant turnover and turmoil. This book is for anyone seeking a finer awareness of the tolls that war takes not just on a nation, but on that nation’s sons and daughters, in whose hearts and minds deeper battles continue to rage long after the soldiers have come home.
Guest Post
My memoir, Fighter
Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War (Rowman and
Littlefield), came out in hardback two years ago and was just reissued in
paper. During the half year after
publication I did a number of interviews and guest blogs about the experiences
the book describes—growing up with a soldier father, moving every two years, and
never having a home. But I haven’t had
much opportunity to talk about the research experiences I went through before
and during the writing process. When
DelSheree invited me to write a guest post about these things for her blog, I
gladly took her up.
I wanted to structure the “plot” of my family’s life
chronologically, with the focus alternating between the larger picture of the
Cold War, the more intimate dramas of our gypsy household, and the private
convolutions of my own psychological development. These were very different stories, and each
demanded its own kind of research.
For the larger picture of the Cold War, I had, of course,
all kinds of books and articles at my disposal.
Studying multiple histories of the many dimensions and geographies of
the Cold War as a professor had given me a lot of background material for the
book. Still, I had to go further, read
more, think harder, about the particular phases that determined my Dad’s
career. Spending time with the wars of
the twentieth century wasn’t pleasant.
Those are bloody stories for anybody, but for me they brought back memories
of hard times at home. With the
names—Eisenhower, Kennedy, Diem—and the places—Vietnam, Moscow, Havana—came
recollections of base housing, where we waited for Dad to come home and hoped
he was alright. Apart from the emotional
edginess, though, this kind of research was relatively straightforward.
For the stories of my own family, the sources were more
complicated. First of all, my father had
never told us anything. Like other
military dads then and now, he was committed to a code of secrecy about the
missions he was involved in. He took
those secrets to his grave. And he chose
not share with my sisters and me those episodes he could relate: they were too violent or frightening in some other
way that might shock our young (and girlish) ears. I have reason to think he did tell these
stories to my boy cousins and perhaps to my mother; but she too was very
circumspect and kept them to herself if she knew them.
What I did have from my Dad was a substantial collection of
letters he wrote. They start during his
years in college and in flight school and continue through the later
years. I’m really grateful to my mother
for keeping them and to my sisters, Nancy and Sarah, for letting me hold onto
them for as long as I have. And a lot of
military records ended up in my mother’s files after my Dad passed away. Those provided a crucial map of the very
complicated chronology of his career and definitive, if cryptic, indications of
where he went and what the missions were.
But much was missing nevertheless. My Dad was a good letter writer, but he would
go for long periods of time without communicating anything. During his first tour in Vietnam, for example,
there was a six-month period when we didn’t hear from him at all. My sisters and I had nightmares and my mother
worried constantly. Eventually we heard
from the Red Cross that he was alright.
It was still a while before we heard from him directly. I describe the effects of all this on my
psyche in the book, but for the purpose of building the narrative it meant I
had to try to sort out the speculative from the factual in family rumors (still
circulating) about where Dad was and what he was doing those months he was in
the dark.
And all the military records aren’t there either. Big gaps fall between years, and much
information about unit missions is absent.
I spent a lot of time trying to get the missing records from the various
US Army and Marine Corps archives. You’d
think this would be pretty straightforward; after all, it’s the military, and
they’re the epitome of organization, right?
But not so. There are a number of
these archives scattered across the country.
Some of them house certain materials, and others different things. Archivists don’t all seem to know which facility
has what. And one of them, a large
storehouse of military records located near St. Louis, burned down in the
1970s. All those documents were lost
forever.
I should say, though, that those archivists and librarians
who I asked for materials were very helpful and did all they could to steer me
in the right direction. Without their
help, I wouldn’t have had nearly as much information to use to build the
narrative of Dad’s assignments that was the plot of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter.
My mother, of course, was another resource for the story of
our family. She was a great story teller. A striking character herself, she gave
dramatic accounts of my Dad, his friends, the extended family, and my sisters
and me as kids. But she was unreliable. She loved the story more than anything, and
the truth sometimes suffered from this. I
interviewed her over a period of several months—this was a few years before I
wrote the memoir—and learned a great deal about our early years that I hadn’t
known before. Much of it turned out to
be accurate. When I checked on her
versions of the larger history and her tales of my Dad’s work, however, I saw
that in some instances she’d picked and chosen scenes and dialogues for their
effectiveness in her story rather than as they had actually happened. I tried to make that in itself part of her
portrait in Fighter Pilot’s Daughter—without
dishonoring her memory.
For the convolutions of my own psychological development, I
had my girl-diaries, journals, and letters to consult. They brought back some of the crucial details
of daily life in our household and in the scattered rooms and apartments I
called home after leaving my parents’ care.
The smells of particular kinds of paint or the odd placement of
windows—these details can really bring life to a memoir, and I was grateful to
my younger self for having kept a record of them.
But the greater pool of information lay in my memory
banks. These in some cases were wide
open, but in others not so much. For the
harder memories, I had to sit with whatever I could clearly recall and wait for
more to come. Sometimes it took days of
going back and waiting. It was like
courting somebody or, I imagine, being a therapist hoping a patient would come
to see something crucial. Memories of my
mother’s anger at me when I came home from college in Paris during a time when
I was breaking away from the family ethics and beliefs came slow and with
difficulty. What was even harder to get
back was the recollection that finally emerged of her actually fearing me. She didn’t understand what influences I’d
been exposed to in Paris and was frightened to know what they might mean. In the end, it was all much ado about
nothing, but it was a hard picture to look at: my own mother, afraid of me.
Living in memory as continuously as I did during the writing
of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter introduced
a rich practice in my life. The more I
remembered, the more I remembered; and
writing was an important vehicle for drawing it out. I’ve tried to keep that going in the months
since the book first emerged. Not that
I’m plotting another memoir (I’ve turned to fiction now and have a novel ready
to go…), but the whole experience of going into the deep past of my youth has
given the self-portrait I carry around with me a lot more dimension than
before. You’d think that somebody who
took on the project of writing a memoir would know a lot about the self being
narrated there. On the other hand, all
this the research—into the histories, letters, journals, interviews, and my own
mind—not only made the book possible, but it worked like a kind of self-therapy:
and a lead to several new understandings of myself as a fighter pilot’s
daughter.
Available now from:
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Fighter-Pilots-Daughter-Growing-Sixties/dp/1442255943/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1441318391&sr=8-1&keywords=Mary+Lawlor+Fighter+Pilot%27s+Daughter
B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/fighter-pilots-daughter-mary-lawlor/1116598567?ean=9781442222007
About the Author
As Mary came of age, tensions grew between the patriotic, Catholic culture of her upbringing and the values of the countercultural sixties. By the time she dropped out of the American College in Paris in 1968, she faced her father, then posted in Saigon, across a deep political divide. Inevitably, the war came home. The fighter pilot, without knowing it, had taught his daughter how to fight back.
Years of turbulence followed. Then, after working in Germany, Spain and Japan, Mary went on to graduate school at NYU, earned a Ph.D. and became a professor of literature and American Studies at Muhlenberg College.
She and her husband spend part of each year on a small farm in the mountains of southern Spain.
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