Mary Lawlor is 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 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 stopping by! What attracted you to the memoir genre?
For a long time, I wanted to map the sequence of my family’s many moves and my dad’s missions as a pilot in the Marine Corps and the Army. I wanted to make sense of what it all meant for my mother, for my sisters and myself. These
experiences left me with a lot of unsorted but powerful feelings—insecurities and confusion about myself, my ability to make friends, about where I belonged, the kind of work my father did as a warrior, and much else. Writing Fighter Pilot’s Daughter gave me a chance to air these feelings and to think about why they were still with me as an adult. My relationship with my parents had been strained during my college years. Fortunately, we managed to get very close again later, but I’d never written about those complicated years or their resolution.
Mapping all this out called for lengthy journeys into memory. The best way to keep track of the memories and to make sense of them was to write them down, and the memoir form seemed the most effective for me. I could have chosen fiction instead and made a novel out of my family’s experiences. But a novel has a way of making its own truth and elaborating its own pressures and pleasures. I needed to stick to the truth of my own experience to make sense of it, even though I had to make characters, so to speak, out of my mother, my father, and sisters, and I had to shape a plot of our moves and the dramatic arc of our relationships with each other. I also thought the book needed a broader, social focus, something to link my experiences to those of others of my time. The memoir was a good format for this, for weaving my family life into the broader story of American national experience during the later years of the Cold War.
Do you write in any other genres?
Yes, I write fiction. I’m just 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.
What inspired you to write Fighter Pilot’s Daughter?
I had been teaching courses at Muhlenberg College on literature and film of the Cold War, and my students, who were sharp readers and viewers of the course materials, kept asking me questions about my own experiences during those years. I started writing notes about episodes that would help illustrate certain themes dramatized in the books and films we were watching. Eventually I started elaborating on the notes and drawing out the scenes and situations. Before I knew it, I had what looked like the beginnings of a memoir in front of me. I took this as a sign that I wanted or needed to write about growing up in a military household during the Cold War. I was also inspired to write the book by the facts that my family moved a lot and that I went to fourteen different schools by the time I finished high school. All the moves and the changes of schools, houses, neighborhoods, towns, produced a good deal of emotional confusion. We were always strangers wherever we lived, and my sisters and I learned to stick close to each other every time we started up in a new school. These experiences and all the complicated feelings they generated stayed with me for many years after I left my parents household. As I said above, I wanted to sort out these feelings and make sense of what all those experiences had meant for me—and what they meant in the context of American Cold War culture.
Can you give us your book blurb so others can find out
what your book is about?
FIGHTER PILOT’S DAUGHTER
details Mary Lawlor’s unconventional upbringing in Cold War America. Memories
of her early life—as the daughter of a Marine Corps and then Army father—reveal
the personal costs of tensions that once gripped the entire world and
illustrate the ways in which bold foreign policy decisions shaped an entire
generation of Americans, defining not just the ways they were raised but who
they would ultimately become. As a child on the move, she was constantly in
search of something to hold on to, a longing that led her toward rebellion, to
college in Paris, and to the kind of self-discovery only possible in the late
1960s.
A personal narrative woven between 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 yearnings, and her eventual successes exemplify those of her entire generation.
How can readers discover more about
you and your work?
https://www.facebook.com/mary.lawlor.186/
http://twitter.com/marylawlor5
You can visit me at www.marylawlor.net
Where can readers buy your book?
Amazon: http://amzn.to/2aZm8p9
Barnes & Noble: http://bit.ly/2cf8ZHB
Rowman & Littlefield: https://bit.ly/3mOkltg
Thank you very much for taking the time out of your
busy schedule to take part in this interview. What’s next for you?
I’m finishing my
novel, The Translators, described above and hoping to see it in print in
the coming year. After that I’ll begin working on revisions of another novel I
started many years ago, The Stars Over Andalucia. It’s also set in
Spain, in a more or less contemporary moment. My husband and I live in Spain
for half the year, and I’ve been inspired by Spanish history and legend to
write several things set there.
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