📖Authors To Watch: Marie McGaha, Author of Your Ghost: A Memoir of Love, Loss and the Echoes That Remain #authorstowatch #interview

 

  

Marie McGaha is an award-winning writer whose work includes clean historical romances, Christian devotionals, and heartfelt children’s books. A storyteller at her core, she weaves faith, resilience, and gentle humor through every page she writes.

She makes her home in southeast Oklahoma, in the foothills of the Ouachita Mountains, where life is anything but quiet. Her days are shared with four spoiled dogs, a crippled rooster with more attitude than feathers, a noisy guinea who believes it runs the place, a couple of flighty hens, and a watchful roo who keeps an eye on everything that moves. This lively little farm—equal parts sanctuary and circus—provides endless inspiration, companionship, and the kind of grounding only God’s creation can offer.

Whether she’s crafting a tender love story, guiding readers through Scripture, or bringing the Bible to life for children through animal characters, Marie writes with a voice shaped by faith, loss, healing, and the stubborn hope that refuses to let go. Her work reflects the heart of a woman who has walked through fire and come out carrying stories worth telling.

You can also join her for daily devotionals on YouTube at @HeReignsChurch, where she shares encouragement, Scripture, and the steady reminder that hope is still alive. You can contact her by email: church.hereigns@gmail.com. 

Marie’s latest book is Your Ghost: A Memoir of Love, Loss and the Echoes That Remain.

Visit her blog at authormariemcgaha.blogspot.com. 

Connect with her on social media at:

╰┈➤ Facebook: www.facebook.com/AuthorMarieMcGaha

╰┈➤ LinkedIn: Linkedin.com/in/mariemcgaha 

Can you tell us a little about yourself?

I’ve been a writer since I was a kid and had no idea how to write but I always knew I was a writer. I have written several books in different genres from historical romance to Christian non-fiction, children’s books, and now my latest book, Your Ghost. I have many grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Can you tell us about your latest book, Your Ghost: A Memoir of Love, Loss and the Echoes That Remain?

This book is by far the most personal and emotionally honest book I’ve ever written. The death of my husband, Nathan, wrecked me. I hadn’t been single since I was 28 years old, and now, in my 60’s, I was single. Losing him was the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to face, so I began writing notes here and there, trying to purge the emotions and pain, and eventually, I had 600 pages of notes. One day, while looking them over, I thought maybe I wasn’t writing just my feelings but maybe others felt the same way and maybe what I went through would help them too.

Is Your Ghost: A Memoir of Love, Loss and the Echoes That Remain your only book?

No, I’ve been writing since long before there were computers in the home and the internet was a dream in someone’s mind. I have written many books in several genres from historic romance to non-fiction devotionals, to children’s books.

Now, can you tell us a little bit about your soulmate that prompted you to write this book?

Nathan is the best man I’ve ever known, then and now. He had never been married, had no children, yet married me with five kids at home and took on the role of being the support of the family like he’d always been with us. He didn’t just marry me, he married us all and took the responsibility very seriously. I was always the most important person in his life and he did everything within his power to make sure I was happy and we all had everything we needed. He was my biggest fan, best support, and loved me like I was the only woman on earth. And he was impossible at the same time. He teased me like we were children on a schoolyard. He played jokes on me, irritated me, which made him happy, and he played with the kids like he was their age. I’ll tell you a little story about him. We lived in the mountains of Idaho and our son-in-law came up the night before to help get wood split for the winter. The next morning at breakfast, I had made sausage, scrambled eggs and pancakes. We sat at the table and Nathan and our sil filled their plates and began eating. Nathan went to put butter on his pancakes but it had just come out of the fridge and was hard, so he banged on it and then held the knife above the cube perfectly still. Our sil froze mid-bite, glanced at Nathan, then at me as if he expected something terrifying to happen. I rolled my eyes as I picked up the butter dish and stuck it in the microwave for a few seconds, then placed it back on the table under Nathan’s knife that was still hanging in the air waiting. He never looked at me or changed expressions, he just buttered his pancakes as if nothing had happened and continued eating. Our sil glanced at Nathan and then at me and slowly began eating again. He was truly a unique man and I will love him forever.

In your book, you discover that grief is not a straight line but a sacred, winding path. Can you explain this?

Grief is not a linear pattern but rather, comes in waves, in varying degrees, and can be any shape you imagine. Even when you think you have a grip on it, something can trigger it and it’ll hit you as if it’s the first time, or it can be a soft hit that you can shake off. It has no limit, no pattern, and no mercy. It is like a nightmare you can’t wake from, and then, sometimes, it’s a fleeting thought. It rips you apart, tears out your heart, assaults your soul, and takes a long time to abate. You never know when it will hit next, how hard it’s going to be, if it’s going to knock you over, or just push a button or two. It comes in varying degrees, at times you least expect it, and refuses to let you go. The one thing I’m sure of is that it never goes away, it never gives peace, it’s just a constant reminder that the biggest part of your life is gone and isn’t coming back no matter how much you cry, beg, or bargain with God.

God played a huge role in helping you to handle your grief. If there were something you could tell him right now, what would that be?

I thank God every day that I’m still here and that He is pulling me through day by day. He is the only reason I survived this long and I am grateful, which wasn’t always the case. In those early months, the whole first year really, I didn’t want to be here. I wanted to be with my husband and I tried. Grief causes insanity. And I had a huge dose of it. I railed at God for taking my husband, knowing how it would affect me, knowing it would wreck me, knowing I couldn’t survive without Nathan. I begged God to bring my husband back. Certainly, if God could make Adam from a handful of dirt, He could bring my husband back from a handful of ashes. Instead, He gave me 2 Corinthians 4. I read it and read it and read it probably twenty or thirty times a day. I still read it because it still gives me hope and strength to get through one more day without Nathan.

Thank you so much for this interview, Marie. What’s next for you?

Thank you for having me. I’m writing another children’s book that I hope will out this fall. This one is for my sister’s two granddaughters and I hope they like it!

Where to purchase the book:

https://a.co/d/0hXo8ni2

Where to find Marie McGaha

https://authormariemcgaha.blogspot.com/

YouTube @HeReignsChurch

 

 

 

Your Ghost: A Memoir of Love, Loss and the Echoes That Remain is a searing, faith-anchored memoir of love, loss, and the long road back to oneself. When Marie’s husband dies without warning, her world fractures in an instant, leaving her to navigate the brutal, unfiltered landscape of grief. In the quiet of an empty house and the chaos of a shattered heart, she wrestles with God, memory, and the haunting presence of the man she can no longer touch but cannot let go.

Told with unflinching honesty and spiritual depth, Your Ghost traces the intimate, day-by-day unraveling and rebuilding of a woman who refuses to let tragedy define the rest of her life. As she confronts guilt, loneliness, anger, and the strange moments when his nearness feels almost tangible, Marie discovers that grief is not a straight line but a sacred, winding path. What emerges is a story not only of devastation, but of resilience—a testament to enduring love, stubborn hope, and the quiet miracles that carry us forward when we think we cannot take another step.

📖Authors To Watch: Mary Lawlor, Author of Fighter Pilot's Daughter #authorstowatch #interview

 

  

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/ 

What inspired you to write your memoir?

When I started writing Fighter Pilot’s Daughter, Mad Men was still airing, and the Cold War was its entire cultural nest. And President Barack Obama had just signed the New START Treaty with President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia. Like START I, signed by the first President Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev, START II limited the number of nuclear warheads and missiles in both the US and Russia. It was an effort to bring about a real end to the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war we’d been living with since the 1950s (and still are). Memories of my girlhood and forgotten fears of nuclear apocalypse were running through my brain day and night.

Back in those days, the fears were abstract as well as tangible. I grew up in a military family. My father was an aviator. Every two years, in response to demands from the Defense Department, we packed up all our cups, plates, sweaters, books, and everything else. The movers would come and take everything away, and off we’d go, by car, plane, or ship to the next posting — Florida, Alabama, North Carolina, California, Germany. By the time I was ready for college, we’d lived in I don’t know how many places and I’d been to 14 schools.

Outside our household, the Cold War climate kept fear hovering in the air all the time. Especially in Germany, we were constantly afraid the Russians would invade or set off a nuclear weapon. The earth would become a nightmare of emptiness, loneliness, hunger. Competition for survival would be vicious.

Through the years of college, graduate school and my work as a professor of literature, echoes of that upbringing moved to the background but kept driving things in the foreground. I moved a lot. I had difficult relationships with friends and boyfriends. Looking at Mad Men and seeing Obama sign that treaty, I saw more clearly how the fears and all the moves of my youth were part of that larger Cold War narrative. I revisited the photo albums my mother made and studied my father’s military record. A narrative of my own started taking shape in my head. I scratched out a draft, then another and another. Writing Fighter Pilot’s Daughter helped sort out and make sense of the complicated past, not just of my own life but the bigger picture of those fractious and difficult years in the life of the nation.

What message do you hope to convey to readers with your book?

I want readers of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter to come away with a deeper understanding of what military kids and spouses experience. I hope the book will show people how complicated it is for these dependents (a fraught word, but it’s the term used in military circles) of service people to maintain healthy and happy family lives when they have to move all the time and when they spend long months separated from the father or mother who’s deployed to war.

The book is also about our patriotic culture, our many wars, and the perhaps inevitable reactions of young Americans to a national identity based on that sort of power projection. I’m thrilled when readers write to say the book has helped them remember and think about events of the time and see how much they’ve shaped history since.

I also have to admit that I’d like my mother and father to be remembered! They were complicated, fascinating, larger than life people. I suppose a lot of people can say that about their parents, but mine were hugely so for me. There are far more stories about them than I was able to recount in Fighter Pilot’s Daughter; but it makes me happy to hear from readers that they feel they know Jack and Frannie; and that they have an idea of what my early life was like. It makes me feel somewhat less of a stranger everywhere I go.

What was your childhood like?

I’ve said a lot about this already, but I’ll add here that there was a lot of tension in our house because of all the moving. Mostly we lived in military quarters and never had our own home. And my father was away from home a lot of the time — on a ship off the coast of Guatemala waiting an invasion to begin, or in northern Turkey investigating a fly-over of the Soviet border, or somewhere close to the border with East Germany, keeping tuned to news from the Fulda Gap. In these and other situations too frightening for my sisters and I to know about, he kept us in suspense from far away. We were happy when he came home, but without meaning to, he frightened us. He’d walk through the door, his head nearly touching the ceiling, his blue eyes lit with a long-distance gaze. It was like he hadn’t really landed. He had gifts. He told stories. But he wasn’t really home yet, and we weren’t sure who he was.

Throughout your childhood, and besides your parents, did you have people in your life that stood out and made a difference?

My Aunt Sandy and Uncle Philip Walsh and their children, my cousins, who lived in New Jersey were always a model for me of the kind of stability I always dreamed of. They lived in the same town and the same house until they were all grown up. They had their complications too, and not everything went perfectly smoothly as my cousins grew up. But they were energetic, imaginative people — and there were a lot of them. Their stability and intelligence meant a lot to me.

If you were to trade places with your father, how would you change his perspective on life? Do you see anything you would have liked to change about him?

My dad was a decorated war hero. My mother, my sisters and I lived in the glow and the shadow of his dangerous, turbulent life. Through all our many moves — I went to 14 schools before I turned seventeen — I remained a good Catholic, a good patriot, and a good student. But when I came of age in the late sixties, I turned away from much of what I’d been taught. Suddenly, the way of life I’d absorbed at Catholic schools and from uncounted patriotic sermons appeared distant and wrong. And all that my father had done in the Korean War and was still doing in Vietnam appeared in a different, darker light.

The confrontations between my father and me as a result of my involvement in the Paris demonstrations shattered my ties to the family and marked my psyche in ways I’ve tried for years to understand better. I was deeply conflicted about my parents at the time, especially about my dad. And I didn’t know how I felt or should feel about myself as the daughter of the man who flew the bombing and strafing missions he did. I wrote the book both to produce a fuller and more nuanced picture of those difficult times and to find a way beyond my own anger at parents I also loved, respected, and missed. Writing Fighter Pilot’s Daughter helped me understand their choices much better than I had in the past.

Will there be a second memoir?

That’s an interesting question. I think about it from time to time, and one of these days I might actually sit down and do it. My husband and I live in Spain half the year and went through a lot buying the property we own there and building our little house. There are zillions of stories to tell about those years. It would be interesting to pick up the narrative from Fighter Pilot’s Daughter and try to connect the different but related experiences. And, of course, the times we’re living through right now bring the Cold War back into view, and I’d really like to roll up my sleeves and write that story too.

Please share what’s next for you?

I’ve just finished a historical novel called The Translators, based on the lives of two medieval priests who traveled from England and Croatia, respectively, to northern Spain in the 1140s. They met and became intimate friends, learned Arabic and translated works in the libraries that once belonged to the emirs of al-Andalus (what the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula was called when it was Arab and Muslim). I’ve fictionalized much of the priests’ lives for the novel but relied on extensive research on the history of the time. A lot of the tension in the story arises from the Church’s attitude toward the books the priests translate for Christians to read. The climax involves the English priest’s sister, who escapes the chaos of home to meet her brother in France, where she helps him and his friend overcome their personal tensions and, indirectly, resolves their struggles with the Church.

 

 

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.

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