5 Things You Should Know About Fighter Pilot's Daughter by Mary Lawlor #5Things

We are so excited to have as our guest today, Mary Lawlor, author of Fighter Pilot's Daughter. She is here to tell us five things you should know about her book!

5 Things You Should Know About Fighter Pilot's Daughter

By Mary Lawlor

1. It’s a true story—an account of my life as one of four daughters in an Irish-American, Catholic, military family.

2. The plot of the book follows the moves we made at the behest of the Marine Corps and Army. And we moved a lot –on average once every two years.

3. Fighter Pilot’s Daughter is my first book of non-academic writing. I spent many years as an English professor and published a couple of academic books. This was my first venture into making a story about my own, personal experience. It was a very exciting and very frightening thing to do. I had no idea if I could pull it off but was thrilled to see that I could.

4. Some readers have wondered how my sisters, who have a central role in Fighter Pilot’s Daughter, reacted to the book. Well before publication, I gave them the manuscript to read. I wanted to know if there was anything they objected to so we could talk about it and work out potential issues. But they were very supportive and didn’t complain about anything—none of the complicated pictures of our family the book conveys, including our father’s alcoholism. I’ve been very grateful for that support and wouldn’t feel right about the book if they hadn’t seen it before it came out.

5. Fighter Pilot’s Daughter is one of the few works of non-fiction about a specific military family and one of even fewer that situates the experience of military family life on base and all the moving within the larger picture of the late Cold War.

~ Book Description ~

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

╰┈➤Read if you love…

✎ᝰ.📓🗒Memoirs

=✪=Military Family

🎖️Life as a Military Brat

🗺️⁀જ✈︎Travel

✌️The Sixties and the Cold War

✈️Fighter Pilots

~ Author Bio ~

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.