Mary Lawlor's memoir "Fighter Pilot's Daughter"
Stars and Stripes
September 20, 2013
Weekend Books
Mary Lawlor at work in Gaucin, Spain, in June 2011. In her memoir, “Fighter Pilot’s Daughter,” Lawlor confronts her unconventional upbringing, rebellious youth and search for a place to belong.
Navigating life
As a nation at war, we know the cost of war. Soldiers lost. Soldiers coming home with permanently altered dreams. Astronomical materiel costs itemized on our collective tab.
Mary Lawlor, in her brilliantly realized mem¬oir, “Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing up in the Sixties and the Cold War,” 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 es¬tate called home. Lawlor sets the ground rules for her book right on page 2:
“I had lots of fantasies of belonging. I dreamt of living with my New Jersey cousins, of going to the same school with them, year after year. Of living, like they did, in the same house until I would go away to college. But place wasn’t some¬thing I could ever claim.”
The lack of a sense of place is what makes Lawlor’s memoir so riveting. Without it, the au¬thor has to find another way to navigate the geog¬raphy of her life. Lawlor chose her father’s plane, an apt metaphor because her father was a career military aviator, first with the Marines, then the Army. From this perspective, Lawlor looks down at the landscape of her life, which begins with the Cold War in the early 1950s.
Lawlor focuses on family, and in the Lawlor family the father, the person who controls the family’s fate, rules in absentia. There is unstated rage that the father is doing exactly what he wants to be doing — flying — while Lawlor, her mother and her sisters must rearrange their lives to suit his. Her parents’ rocky relationship is a steady beat throughout the narrative, a familiar one to anyone whose parents must try to remem¬ber what they loved about each other after long, forced separations.
“In May (1953), the five of us joined him in Miami, and for the first time in two years we were living with our father. We kept moving like gypsies nonetheless.”
This rootlessness propelled Lawlor toward rebellion. In first grade in 1955 and the new girl in a Florida elementary school, Lawlor is im¬mediately ostracized when the popular alpha girl pronounces, “I don’t like Mary … I don’t like the way she acts,” based on nothing except her outsider status. The feeling it induced in Lawlor, she writes, was growing anger waiting to explode, which it does when Lawlor finally rebels while attending the American College in Paris during the height of the Vietnam War and falls in with an underground draft resister organization. You don’t have to be Freud to appreciate the delicious irony of what follows.
When the faux parent administrators at the American College find out what she is doing, they contact her father, who is pulled off the tarmac at an airfield in Vietnam right before he was to take off on a bombing mission, and granted permission to fly to Paris to rescue her from the clutches of the “communists.”
The book is filled with class consciousness: the frustration of explaining what a chief warrant officer (CWO) is to people who are used to birds and bars in the chain of command and yes, my daddy is still an officer; the discomfort of having African-American servants.
But the 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.
Lawlor, to her credit as a writer, never claims victimhood for being born in a time that was shaped largely by men and living a life shaped by a father in the military. She tells her tale from the vantage point of someone who has built her own aircraft to navigate life. By the time she is writing her Ph.D. dissertation on the deck of her then-retired parents’ home in Connecticut, her father has stopped his arguing and drinking and in a gesture as lovely as it is humble, he declares a truce by serving her lunch.
Bathsheba Monk is an author whose most recent book is “Dead Wrong.” Contact her at www.bathshebamonk.com
September 20, 2013
Weekend Books
Navigating life
As a nation at war, we know the cost of war. Soldiers lost. Soldiers coming home with permanently altered dreams. Astronomical materiel costs itemized on our collective tab.
Mary Lawlor, in her brilliantly realized mem¬oir, “Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing up in the Sixties and the Cold War,” 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 es¬tate called home. Lawlor sets the ground rules for her book right on page 2:
“I had lots of fantasies of belonging. I dreamt of living with my New Jersey cousins, of going to the same school with them, year after year. Of living, like they did, in the same house until I would go away to college. But place wasn’t some¬thing I could ever claim.”
The lack of a sense of place is what makes Lawlor’s memoir so riveting. Without it, the au¬thor has to find another way to navigate the geog¬raphy of her life. Lawlor chose her father’s plane, an apt metaphor because her father was a career military aviator, first with the Marines, then the Army. From this perspective, Lawlor looks down at the landscape of her life, which begins with the Cold War in the early 1950s.
Lawlor focuses on family, and in the Lawlor family the father, the person who controls the family’s fate, rules in absentia. There is unstated rage that the father is doing exactly what he wants to be doing — flying — while Lawlor, her mother and her sisters must rearrange their lives to suit his. Her parents’ rocky relationship is a steady beat throughout the narrative, a familiar one to anyone whose parents must try to remem¬ber what they loved about each other after long, forced separations.
“In May (1953), the five of us joined him in Miami, and for the first time in two years we were living with our father. We kept moving like gypsies nonetheless.”
This rootlessness propelled Lawlor toward rebellion. In first grade in 1955 and the new girl in a Florida elementary school, Lawlor is im¬mediately ostracized when the popular alpha girl pronounces, “I don’t like Mary … I don’t like the way she acts,” based on nothing except her outsider status. The feeling it induced in Lawlor, she writes, was growing anger waiting to explode, which it does when Lawlor finally rebels while attending the American College in Paris during the height of the Vietnam War and falls in with an underground draft resister organization. You don’t have to be Freud to appreciate the delicious irony of what follows.
When the faux parent administrators at the American College find out what she is doing, they contact her father, who is pulled off the tarmac at an airfield in Vietnam right before he was to take off on a bombing mission, and granted permission to fly to Paris to rescue her from the clutches of the “communists.”
The book is filled with class consciousness: the frustration of explaining what a chief warrant officer (CWO) is to people who are used to birds and bars in the chain of command and yes, my daddy is still an officer; the discomfort of having African-American servants.
But the 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.
Lawlor, to her credit as a writer, never claims victimhood for being born in a time that was shaped largely by men and living a life shaped by a father in the military. She tells her tale from the vantage point of someone who has built her own aircraft to navigate life. By the time she is writing her Ph.D. dissertation on the deck of her then-retired parents’ home in Connecticut, her father has stopped his arguing and drinking and in a gesture as lovely as it is humble, he declares a truce by serving her lunch.
Bathsheba Monk is an author whose most recent book is “Dead Wrong.” Contact her at www.bathshebamonk.com
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