In search of father’s voice, ‘FBI Girl’ author finds her own

A few years after her father’s death, author Maura Conlon-McIvor began navigating the bureaucracy necessary to extricate his personnel files from his old employer, the FBI.

When the heavy stack finally arrived, Conlon-McIvor hoped that here, finally, lay the center of the man whose code she’d spent her life trying to decipher. Instead, she found page after page where thick, black lines obscured crucial details. In the end, she could glean not much more than his personnel and medical evaluations.

“But that’s OK,” she said in a recent interview. “Who my father was in the end went far beyond his being a special agent in the FBI.”

Her search for the man who came home every day to her family’s Southern California home in his black FBI car, golden cartridge cases still strewn across the trunk, is at the core of Conlon-McIvor’s new memoir, “FBI Girl: How I Learned to Crack My Father’s Code.” The book provides a rare glimpse inside the family life of an FBI agent, at a time when the inner workings of the agency, and its perceived failings, are being questioned.

Readers see the fervently Roman Catholic, proudly Irish Conlon family in their suburban Los Angeles housing tract in the mid-1960s, where even the relentlessly sunny weather can’t hide the shadows cast by the nearby naval weapons station, or the “ism” of the day — not terrorism, but Communism.

Every Sunday night, the Conlons gather around their television set to watch “The FBI” with Efrem Zimbalist Jr. On television, the voice of the young Maura Conlon informs us, the “bad guys” are always captured. In real life, she wants to be just as certain that her father can always do the same.

And so she reads Nancy Drew books, practices her skulking and eavesdrops on her father’s conversations, hoping he might yield a clue, any clue at all. He resists her persistence, except in isolated, sweet moments, such as one day when he drops her off at Catholic school, the police scanner whirring in the background of his car.

“When you’re driving, do not turn when you look into the rearview mirror. Keep your head perfectly still. If you keep your head still, the guy behind won’t know that you know you are being followed,” Conlon-McIvor writes, telling of her father’s unexpected advice as she stood, stock-still and mouth open.

But what really moves her father are the two life-changing events that bracket Conlon-McIvor’s remembered childhood: the birth of her youngest brother, Joe Jr., who has Down syndrome, and, seven years later, the brutal murder of her beloved uncle, a selfless New York priest honored for his work with the elderly and minorities.

Joe Jr. was born in an age where her parents were not even told what was wrong with their newborn until he was several months old, a world where nuns still referred to him as “Mongoloid.” Until her brother’s birth, Conlon-McIvor writes, her father’s silence about his job had enveloped their entire home, falling like a mantle on her mother and siblings, too.

“But Joe Jr. was out there on the front corner, waving to cars as people were coming home from work,” she said. “He didn’t care what people thought about him. Joe made the rest of our family unshy.”

His birth, and the fierce, tender protectiveness her parents felt for him, loosened something for the entire family, Conlon-McIvor said.

“I would say to my Dad, ‘You are obsessed with him,’ which took a lot of nerve, because I loved Joe madly,” she recalled. “But my father was clearly obsessed with people like Joe, with the absolute love and simplicity they embodied without ego or expectation.”

If Joe Jr. was one person who could draw out Conlon-McIvor’s father, her uncle was the other. The two shared a Queens, N.Y., upbringing steeped in baseball exploits and their mother’s thick Irish brogue. And Father Jack’s visits to California are the one time when the stories of Joe Conlon come tumbling out.

“I look up into his eyes,” Conlon-McIvor writes of a long-ago encounter with her uncle. “I have never looked at them up close. They are just like Dad’s eyes, but with green, like frogs, mixed in with the blue. His eyes bend slightly at the corners, like they want to reach down to his mouth, which says nice and gentle words.”

So when Father Jack is shot in his own parish during a botched robbery attempt, Joe Conlon snaps shut again, choking on his own silent misery. For his daughter, however, the death had just the opposite effect. Looking back, she says she knew then that she wanted to be a writer, and tell the story of her family.

“We experience things in the human heart that are meant to be articulated,” she said. “Why experience these things if they are meant to stay inside?”

There has been no official FBI response to the book. But when Conlon-McIvor attended a recent convention of retired FBI agents in San Francisco, she met an agent who worked with her father in New York on Father Jack’s murder.

“He started to tell me what my father could never tell me, which was a memory of Grandma Molly, sitting next to the casket, holding the hand of her dead son,” Conlon-McIvor said. “It was a healing for both of us. There were tears that needed to be shed for probably 30 years.

Conlon-McIvor’s path to her memoir was an unlikely one. She majored in communications at the University of Iowa, then decamped for New York City, where she spent a brief period working at The New Yorker and at travel magazines. She eventually settled into working in educational publishing and films, then moved to Oregon to work for a digital animation firm.

All along, she’d been writing sketches of her childhood, reconstructing that world through her old journals, conversations with her mother and fragments of old memories that rushed back when she closed her eyes and thought hard. About four years ago, while working on her doctorate in psychology, she realized she had the makings of a book.

For inspiration, she looked to other childhood memoirs by such Irish-American writers as Frank McCourt and Dan Barry.

Editors at Warner Books, which announced a first run of about 50,000 copies of “FBI Girl,” were drawn to the story by the writing, said Beth de Guzman, the editorial director for mass marketing. The book is being marketed in particular to women, who can relate to its theme of a daughter trying to connect with her father, de Guzman said.

The black-and-white photographs of the Conlon family sprinkled through the book are meant to reinforce its intimacy, de Guzman added. “It should have the feeling of a photo album,” she said. “Here she is, opening up her life to people, saying here is my family, my story.”

Conlon-McIvor’s effort has been met with critical praise. Publishers’ Weekly said that she “conveys her time and setting with precision and detail; her feel for story, structure and understatement rightfully earns the poignancy of many moments.” And Booklist called the memoir an “occasionally funny, affecting account of family ties and personal growth.”

Next, Conlon-McIvor, who is married to a surgeon, Andrew McIvor, hopes to write another book, one that combines her interest in literature with her training in psychology. These days, though, she doesn’t regret giving up her first career as an amateur sleuth.

“I was an FBI girl for 13 years,” she said. “I knew everything about Hoover and the gangsters. I even designed myself a special agent wardrobe. But that was my first career &
#8212; it was time to move on.”