📙 A Bookish Word or Two with Mary Lawlor, Author of Fighter Pilot's Daughter

 

 

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/ 

Read below what inspired Mary to write her book.  

Remembering the 60s and the Cold War for Fighter Pilot's Daughter by Mary Lawlor 

Fighter Pilot’s Daughter was one of the most difficult projects I’ve ever undertaken. It was also probably the most important thing I’ve ever done for myself. Putting the book together was like a process of self-therapy: it had a powerful stabilizing effect that stays with me now. Part of this came with the clear account the research and the writing made of my family’s zigzagging past.

Like most military families, we moved a lot (fourteen times before I graduated from high school). And like other Army fathers, my Dad was away often. My mother and sisters and I would worry about his safety, especially when he was flying in war zones. He would write my mother fairly regularly for a while, then his communications would dwindle off under the weight of more pressing matters close at hand. This would leave us wondering how he was, and I often had nightmares of him being captured, imprisoned…

In spite of the fact that we missed him fiercely, Dad’s homecomings weren’t as easy as we expected them to be. Familiar as he was, his tall frame in the doorway and his blaring blue eyes with that far-away look were strange and frightening. After a while, we’d get used to him; but I wonder how long it would take him to get used to being home. He’d been in such a different, all-male world where violence reigned. At home, there were only women. My mother and sisters and I knew little about what he’d been through, not just because we were too young to know but because a lot of what he’d been up to was secret.

We never talked about any of this, so our house was a tense, uneasy place when Dad came home. Indigenous people in many parts of the world have rituals for bringing warriors home—practices aimed at diminishing the potency of trauma and other effects of prolonged exposure to violence. I guess we’re starting to see something like this in the debriefings and psychological attention given to soldiers and marines returning from war. But in the sixties there wasn’t anything like it. Dads just came home, still warriors, and now being asked not to be.

The story of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter had to have a plot—not just the order of our moves but the dramas that accompanied them. It was difficult enough getting all my father’s military records so I could see the the crazy chain of our moves from one place to another. It was even harder to go back into memories that reawakened painful feelings of confusion and anxiety that came with being new all the time. All those scenes where I was a stranger and everybody else belonged still stung.

Making a story out my family life meant describing my parents, sisters, and myself as if we were characters. I had to give physical portraits, convey personalities and make us say things. The truth had to be the first priority, but the truth can be messy. These portraits had to be shaped so readers could make sense of who I was talking about. I think human character is, in the end, more complex than any literary character. Picturing human beings in their ordinary rawness is very difficult. A reader needs a writer to give their literary characters more specific shape and continuity than most of us usually have—features that allow a reader to recognize a person from one page to the next. In memoirs and biographies, those shapes and continuities have to be made from real materials—the habits and speech styles and surprising ticks of real human beings. So my family members and me ended up appearing in the book in more definitive shape than we actually had. Still, these descriptions adhered to the truth of my memory as much as I could make them.

Writing Fighter Pilot’s Daughter gave me a chance to air the ragged feelings still running in my brain and heart from those days long ago. Some of these feelings had to do with the work my father did. As a teenager, I had a hard time understanding how I felt or should feel about the things he did as a warrior. When I went away to college, I drifted from my parents and made friends with people in left political groups and the anti-Vietnam War movement. In Paris, in May of 1968, I participated in demonstrations against, among other things, the war my father was fighting At the time, he was posted outside Saigon. When I saw him again, the tension between us was almost too much. We had heated arguments, and then for a long we didn’t speak. Much later my parents and I got to be very close, and I’m deeply grateful for that. Being retired from military life, Dad had changed dramatically.

I wanted to write about all this so I could sort out those powerful emotions that were still with me. I hope Fighter Pilot’s Daughter strikes a chord with other military kids. And I hope it gives readers in general a better understanding of what military kids go through. When I tell people I grew up in an Army family, they often say Was it like “The Great Santini”? It’s surprising how often people ask that. The answer is no. Santini was an abusive father, and while many soldier fathers are professionally familiar with violence, they don’t necessarily bring it home with them. Pat Conroy, author of The Great Santini tells a great story, but as he says himself it’s his story, not a representative account of military family life. His book is is one of the few that features a Marine Corps pilot, his wife and children as the central characters, so it often gets taken as a model of military family life.

I hope readers of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter see that there are other ways of describing domestic life for service families. Many of the biggest difficulties for spouses and children are built into the structures of everyday life in military environments. I hope readers take from my book a sense of how complicated it is to maintain a healthy, optimistic family life when you’re having to move all the time and when a parent has to spend long months away from home on deployments. For all the good or ill the armed services might do for America, they can bear down hard on the lives of soldiers’ wives as kids. And they can make make their lives wildly interesting, as I hope Fighter Pilot’s Daughter shows.

📙 A Bookish Word or Two with Mary Lawlor, Author of Fighter Pilot's Daughter #abookishword

 

 

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/ 

Read below what inspired Mary to write her book.  

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.

📙 A Bookish Word or Two with Theresa Cheung, Author of NightBorn #abookishword

 

 

On A Bookish Word or Two, we have a guest post by Theresa Cheung, author of NightBorn.  Theresa is an internationally bestselling author and public speaker. She has been writing about spirituality, dreams and the paranormal for the past 25 years, and was listed by Watkins Mind Body and Spirit magazine as one of the 100 most spiritually influential living people in 2023. She has a degree in Theology and English from Kings College, Cambridge University, frequently collaborating with leading scientists and neuroscientists researching consciousness. Theresa is regularly featured in national newspapers and magazines, and she is a frequent radio, podcast and television guest and ITV: This Morning's regular dream decoding expert. She hosts her own popular spiritual podcast called White Shores and weekly live UK Health Radio Show: The Healing Power of Your Dreams. Her latest book is the paranormal thriller, Nightborn, available at Amazon US and Amazon UK.

You can visit her website at www.theresacheung.com or connect with her on X, Facebook, Instagram or Goodreads.

  

In her book, NightBorn, Alice Sinclair, a driven psychology professor, is about to find out what if the line between your waking life and your darkest dreams disappeared forever? When thousands of people begin experiencing terrifying, vivid nightmares … all centered around her, Alice’s quiet academic life is shattered. Haunted by the question of why she’s become the subject of these shared dreams, Alice embarks on a desperate search for answers, uncovering a chilling secret: someone – or something – hungry for global power has discovered a way to manipulate consciousness itself. The world is fast becoming a playground for those in control of the dreaming mind.  In a heart-stopping race against time, Alice must navigate a treacherous web of deception, where nothing – and no one – can be trusted, not even herself.

Read a sample.

NightBorn is available at Amazon US and Amazon UK.

Read below what inspired Theresa to write her book. 

Some Dreams Refuse to Stay Silent: How NightBorn Found Its Way Into the World by Theresa Cheung

For more than twenty years, dreams have been the centre of my professional universe. I’ve spent my life studying them, interpreting them, writing about them, and when I’m very lucky helping people understand the extraordinary intelligence hidden in their sleeping minds. My readers know me for my dream

dictionaries (including The Dream Dictionary A–Z, originally The Element Encyclopaedia of 20,000 Dreams), my research into the afterlife, spirituality, intuition, and all the places where science meets mystery. I’m also the resident dream expert on ITV’s This Morning, where callers regularly share the inner landscapes that puzzle or inspire them.

So yes, I’ve been called the British grande dame of dreams and, on some days, I happily accept the title. But NightBorn, my debut novel, is something different. It’s the book that came not from analysis or academic study, but from a creative impulse I simply couldn’t contain. In many ways, it feels like the dream I’d been waiting for my whole life.

Dreams in My DNA

My fascination with dreaming didn’t begin in a library. It began at home. I grew up surrounded by family members who spoke openly about intuition, symbolism, and spiritual experiences. Dream interpretation was woven into everyday conversation. By the time I went to King’s College, Cambridge to study Theology and English, I already saw dreams as both deeply personal and universally significant. They aren’t just psychological events—they’re stories, messages, mirrors, warnings, and sometimes gifts.

For years, my mission has been to normalise dreamwork, to show that dreams hold profound insights into emotional, spiritual, and creative life. But as much as my nonfiction books reached countless readers, I knew that many younger audiences, like my own daughter, arely pick up spiritual or psychological nonfiction.

I couldn’t shake the question:
How could I speak to readers who love stories but would never open a dream dictionary?

The Spark Came From My Daughter’s Bookshelf

My daughter devours gothic fantasy and dark psychological fiction. She reads with a passion I envy but she has never been even mildly tempted to read my reference books.

One afternoon, watching her tucked into a corner with some atmospheric, shadowy novel, a thought struck me with startling clarity: What if I slipped dream interpretation into a story she couldn’t resist?

That moment planted the seed. I began imagining a novel where everything I’ve discovered about dreams, archetypes, and the subconscious could hide beneath a narrative full of tension, mystery, and emotional punch. A book that felt like a dream, beautiful, unsettling, layered, while quietly teaching readers how to understand their own inner worlds.

That idea became the heartbeat of NightBorn. Every major character carries some connection to dreams, psychology, or the unseen workings of the mind. Their conflicts and revelations echo the symbolism I’ve studied for decades. And the core message - Some dreams must be set free, Nightmares, after all, are dreams too - became both the theme and the spine of the story.

A Leap Into the Unknown

Despite my enthusiasm, writing fiction was far outside my established world. I knew how to structure a dream dictionary, how to analyse symbols, how to explain spiritual concepts clearly but writing a novel requires a wholly different set of muscles.

I had to learn those muscles from scratch.

I consulted trusted author friends, took workshops, and accepted critique I knew would sting. Slowly, the manuscript grew more layered, emotional, unpredictable, just like the dreams that inspired it.

Finishing it was a victory. What came next was the challenge.

When I sent NightBorn to my longstanding nonfiction publishers, the response was warm but firm. They didn’t want me wandering outside the spiritual/dream niche they had built around me. Fiction simply didn’t fit their expectation of what a “Theresa Cheung book” should be.

The polite rejection hurt but it also crystallised how deeply I believed in this story. So I took a risk. I partnered with an indie press, knowing I would receive no advance and little of the traditional publishing safety net I had once relied on.

It felt like jumping without seeing the ground. But sometimes the only way to honour a dream is to leap.

Five Years of Detours and Determination

From the first notes in my journal to the finished copy landing in my hands, NightBorn took nearly five years to come to life. I rewrote it countless times between my nonfiction deadlines. I questioned myself. I doubted whether anyone would ever read it.

But the story wouldn’t let me go. And I’ve learned over decades of dreamwork that when something refuses to be silenced - whether it’s a dream or an idea - you must pay attention.

One of the most delightfully unexpected turns in this journey involved the cover. We had no budget for a designer, so my son-in-law offered to try creating something. The result is striking, eerie, and unmistakably NightBorn. Readers tell me it gives them chills. Some say it triggers dream recall. I couldn’t imagine a better response.

A Story With a Purpose Hidden in Its Pages

Many readers on Goodreads have given me reactions that surprised and moved me. People talk about the plot and the characters, of course but many also say the book made them remember their dreams again, or think differently about their subconscious, or reflect on aspects of themselves they had ignored.

That reaction means everything to me because it reflects the book’s true intent.
NightBorn is, on the surface, a psychological thriller. Beneath that, it’s a secret guidebook - a way of showing readers how powerful their inner worlds really are.

Dreams are natural healers. They are storytellers. And they are teachers. I believe dreamwork should be as essential as reading and writing in early education. Imagine if every teenager knew how to listen to the messages their psyche sends each night. Imagine how empowered they would feel.

My Fictional Love Letter to the Dreaming Mind

NightBorn is the book that unites both halves of myself: the researcher and the dream evangelist, the scholar and the storyteller. It represents my belief that fiction can sometimes carry truth more powerfully than facts alone.

My hope is simple: That NightBorn encourages readers - especially those who might never pick up a nonfiction guide - to honour their dreams again. Because some of the most transformative journeys begin quietly, in darkness, with a dream that refuses to be ignored.