FBI Girl
How I Learned to Crack My Father's Code . . . With Love
- History & Biography
- Publisher: Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2017
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Publisher's Description
In a house teeming with life, young Maura, voted the Most Quiet Girl in Catholic school, notices everything but says little. Eager to penetrate the secret world of her father, FBI agent Joe Conlon, she is drawn to the bureau drawer where he places his badge at night. The time is the late 1960s, and Vietnam and the Cold War are fomenting unrest outside Maura's suburban Los Angeles home. Inside, the Conlons and their five children are still bound by tradition: baseball games, Sunday dinners of roast beef and mashed potatoes, and The FBI on TV. Under the watchful gaze of J. Edgar Hoover's picture, Maura's mother, a former New York bathing beauty, remains a housemaker even as she slips out for assertiveness training. And there's the one unshakable rule of all: Joe Conlon never talks about his job. In fact, he rarely speaks at all. Believing that he communicates in code, Maura is determined to crack it. She uses clues gleaned from Nancy Drew mysteries, eavesdrops on adult conversations, and spins larger-than-life fantasies in her head, with her younger brother, Joey, who has Down syndrome, at her side. But her flights of fancy turn sober with a murder in the family. Suddenly her father's silence speaks volumes, and she learns a lesson from him abut fierce love during a time of devastating loss. Bathed in luminous nostalgia, resonating with hilarious and painful memories, FBI GIRL is the coming-of-age story of a highly imaginative girl and a passionate homage to family bonds, the trials that test them, and the triumphs that make them stronger.
Endorsements (8)
“FBI Girl is a gorgeous, sumptuous book. Conlon-McIvor takes a subject (herself and her family) that might have sunk in other hands, beats egg white under her words and the whole thing rises like a dream. It's a love story for her people and for a time and place. Read it.”
“FBI Girl, written with “a touch of the poet,” surprises and delights on every page. It vividly recreates recent American history as experienced through the eyes of a precious and gifted girl growing up in a family challenged by a father’s difficult work and personality, a child’s disability, a murder, puberty, religion and government service. This book is memoir, fitting into the sub-genre of children surviving traumatic childhoods. But it can stand along the finest coming of age novels; the narrator and her awakening remind me of the wonderful characters of Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird and Franny in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I really like this kid and her beautiful book.”
““Beguiling…Few memoirs in recent memory offer such wit, poignancy, and pleasure.”
“Gets the details just right to sweetly evoke an earlier era. Maura Conlon-McIvor lovingly shows how a child with a disability can reveal a family's unspoken capacity for love.”
“An unusual achievement. Joe, Joey, and young Maura Conlon evolve, page by page, heartbeat by heartbeat, in this most notable work.”
“Touching and funny, inspiring and tragic, enlightening and sad. I closed the book with tears in my eyes and admiration in my heart for the girl Maura Conlon was and the writer she became.”
“Enthralling…a book to treasure…speaks to the universal themes of love and dignity and the healing power that comes from the heart. The best memoirs teach us about ourselves. Maura Conlon-McIvor does that with poignancy, humor and real heartbreak.”
“Oh, I love this book…a funny, moving, beautifully rendered account of a girl coming to know her father.”
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