Book Trailer Feature: Fighter Pilot's Daughter by Mary Lawlor #booktrailer

 

Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War tells the story of Mary Lawlor’s dramatic, roving life as a warrior’s child. A family biography and a young woman’s vision of the Cold War, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter narrates the more than many transfers the family made from Miami to California to Germany as the Cold War demanded. Each chapter describes the workings of this traveling household in a different place and time. The book’s climax takes us to Paris in May ’68, where Mary—until recently a dutiful military daughter—has joined the legendary student demonstrations against among other things, the Vietnam War. Meanwhile her father is flying missions out of Saigon for that very same war. Though they are on opposite sides of the political divide, a surprising reconciliation comes years later.

⤷Read sample here.

⤷Fighter Pilot’s Daughter is available at Amazon.

╰┈➤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

╰┈➤Here’s What Readers Have To Say!

“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

 

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/.

Connect with her on social media at:

╰┈➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mary.lawlor.186/ 

Guest: The Inspiration Behind Fighter Pilot's Daughter by Mary Lawlor #guest

 

 

 

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/.

Connect with her on social media at:

╰┈➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mary.lawlor.186/ 

The Inspiration Behind Fighter Pilot's Daughter by Mary Lawlor

For decades I’ve wanted to go back into memory and revisit how it felt to be a stranger everywhere when I was a military child. I also wanted to explore the old feelings of worry and fear I lived with when my Dad was away at war. I also wanted to think hard about what all the moving and my father’s absences meant for my mother and sisters. I started writing what turned out to be Fighter Pilot’s Daughter about five years before the book came out. The academic in me kept thinking I had to make the dates and world historical events clear, but another part of me knew it was the personal stuff, the raw feelings and images, that would bring out more memories and make a better story.

Studying my father’s career again—in the pages of his letters, in the photographs, and the interviews with my mother—brought back the old dramas. His dramatic departures, the excitement of his returns. The way the ground shook on the tarmac and the way his flight suit smelled of canvas and fuel.

My mother on the other hand came back in the photos as a tall, slender Saks girl, with thick, black hair, wearing glasses, and looking intelligent. Later she’s curled up under a tree with my twin sisters wearing a piquet sun dress. The twins are modeling Saks baby clothes. Frannie looks sweet and gentle.

The years go by fast in the pictures. My parents start looking less happy behind their smiles. The have four four little kids and the money’s stretched thin. Cocktails in the evening ease the troubles. Evidence of these nightly rituals leave are legible in their faces.

My mother’s voice comes back, her chin-up, pleasant chiming of everything’s-great-even-if-we-are-packing up-again; then her smoky, confident growl. This brings me right back inside the itinerant pilot’s house that was “home” for so many years. The furniture is there, the paintings and the books we transported from house to house. My father comes through the door and bellows “Hi ya, Mame. What ya doing?”

In the late sixties, I had an explosive blow-up with my parents. I had joined the anti-Vietnam War movement while at college in Paris. Meanwhile my Dad was in Saigon fighting that very war. We didn’t speak for a year. Much later we found our way back to each other. Still, remnants of the jagged-edged feelings lurked in my heart. Writing Fighter Pilot’s Daughter helped me sort through these mine fields. I came to a more sympathetic understanding of my mother and father, the people with whom I had argued so much but who I always loved and still miss.

It took longer than I hoped—almost five years. If memory is never precise, the process of writing the memoir got me closer to the raw wounds, explosive thrills, and resentments I’m still trying to shed than ever before. This is what I had to go through to answer that kid in the back of the classroom. His question—“what was it like?”—was my own. Fighter Pilot’s Daughter is my answer.

 

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

Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War tells the story of Mary Lawlor’s dramatic, roving life as a warrior’s child. A family biography and a young woman’s vision of the Cold War, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter narrates the more than many transfers the family made from Miami to California to Germany as the Cold War demanded. Each chapter describes the workings of this traveling household in a different place and time. The book’s climax takes us to Paris in May ’68, where Mary—until recently a dutiful military daughter—has joined the legendary student demonstrations against among other things, the Vietnam War. Meanwhile her father is flying missions out of Saigon for that very same war. Though they are on opposite sides of the political divide, a surprising reconciliation comes years later.

★★★★★ ORDER YOUR COPY ★★★★★

Amazon → https://www.amazon.com/Fighter-Pilots-Daughter-Growing-Sixties/dp/144222200X

Inside the Pages: Fighter Pilot's Daughter by Mary Lawlor

 

Title: Fighter Pilot's Daughter
Author: Mary Lawlor
Publisher: Rowman and Littlefield
Pages: 323
Genre: Memoir

Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War tells the story of Mary Lawlor’s dramatic, roving life as a warrior’s child. A family biography and a young woman’s vision of the Cold War, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter narrates the more than many transfers the family made from Miami to California to Germany as the Cold War demanded. Each chapter describes the workings of this traveling household in a different place and time. The book’s climax takes us to Paris in May ’68, where Mary—until recently a dutiful military daughter—has joined the legendary student demonstrations against among other things, the Vietnam War. Meanwhile her father is flying missions out of Saigon for that very same war. Though they are on opposite sides of the political divide, a surprising reconciliation comes years later.

★★★★★ ORDER YOUR COPY ★★★★★

______________________

______________________

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 distance, 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 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.

These were the early years of the Cold War. It was a time of vivid fears, pictured nowadays in photos of kids hunkered under their school desks. My sisters and I did that. The phrase “air raid drill” rang hard—the double-A sound a cold, metallic twang, ending with ill. It meant rehearsal for a time when you might get burnt by the air you breathed.

Every day we heard practice rounds of artillery fire and ordinance on the near horizon. We knew what all this training was for. It was to keep the world from ending. Our father was one of many dads who sweat at soldierly labor, part of an arsenal kept at the ready to scare off nuclear annihilation of life on earth. When we lived on post, my sisters and I saw uniformed men marching in straight lines everywhere. This was readiness, the soldiers rehearsing against Armageddon. The rectangular buildings where the commissary, the PX, the bowling alley, and beauty shop were housed had fallout shelters in the basements, marked with black and yellow wheels, the civil defense insignia. Our dad would often leave home for several days on maneuvers, readiness exercises in which he and other men played war games designed to match the visions of big generals and political men. Visions of how a Russian air and ground attack would happen. They had to be ready for it.

A clipped, nervous rhythm kept time on military bases. It was as if you needed to move efficiently to keep up with things, to be ready yourself, even if you were just a kid. We were chased by the feeling that life as we knew it could change in an hour.

This was the posture. On your mark, get set. But there was no go. It was a policy of meaningful waiting. Meaningful because it was the waiting itself that counted—where you did it, how many of the necessities you had, how long you could keep it up. Imagining long, sunless days with nothing to do but wait for an all-clear sign or for the threatening, consonant-heavy sounds of a foreign language overhead, I taught myself to pray hard.

– Excerpted from Fighter Pilot’s Daughter by Mary Lawlor, Rowman and Littlefield, 2013. Reprinted with permission.

 ______________________

______________________

 

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.

 

Inside the Pages: Fighter Pilot's Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War by Mary Lawlor

 

Title: Fighter Pilot's Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War
Author: Mary Lawlor
Publisher: Rowman and Littlefield
Pages: 323
Genre: Memoir

Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War tells the story of Mary Lawlor’s dramatic, roving life as a warrior’s child. A family biography and a young woman’s vision of the Cold War, Fighter Pilot’s Daughter narrates the more than many transfers the family made from Miami to California to Germany as the Cold War demanded. Each chapter describes the workings of this traveling household in a different place and time. The book’s climax takes us to Paris in May ’68, where Mary—until recently a dutiful military daughter—has joined the legendary student demonstrations against among other things, the Vietnam War. Meanwhile her father is flying missions out of Saigon for that very same war. Though they are on opposite sides of the political divide, a surprising reconciliation comes years later.

★★★★★ ORDER YOUR COPY ★★★★★

______________________

______________________

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 distance, 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 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.

These were the early years of the Cold War. It was a time of vivid fears, pictured nowadays in photos of kids hunkered under their school desks. My sisters and I did that. The phrase “air raid drill” rang hard—the double-A sound a cold, metallic twang, ending with ill. It meant rehearsal for a time when you might get burnt by the air you breathed.

Every day we heard practice rounds of artillery fire and ordinance on the near horizon. We knew what all this training was for. It was to keep the world from ending. Our father was one of many dads who sweat at soldierly labor, part of an arsenal kept at the ready to scare off nuclear annihilation of life on earth. When we lived on post, my sisters and I saw uniformed men marching in straight lines everywhere. This was readiness, the soldiers rehearsing against Armageddon. The rectangular buildings where the commissary, the PX, the bowling alley, and beauty shop were housed had fallout shelters in the basements, marked with black and yellow wheels, the civil defense insignia. Our dad would often leave home for several days on maneuvers, readiness exercises in which he and other men played war games designed to match the visions of big generals and political men. Visions of how a Russian air and ground attack would happen. They had to be ready for it.

A clipped, nervous rhythm kept time on military bases. It was as if you needed to move efficiently to keep up with things, to be ready yourself, even if you were just a kid. We were chased by the feeling that life as we knew it could change in an hour.

This was the posture. On your mark, get set. But there was no go. It was a policy of meaningful waiting. Meaningful because it was the waiting itself that counted—where you did it, how many of the necessities you had, how long you could keep it up. Imagining long, sunless days with nothing to do but wait for an all-clear sign or for the threatening, consonant-heavy sounds of a foreign language overhead, I taught myself to pray hard.

– Excerpted from Fighter Pilot’s Daughter by Mary Lawlor, Rowman and Littlefield, 2013. Reprinted with permission.

______________________

______________________

 

 

 

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.