January 9 is my mother’s birthday. She passed away last year, just two weeks after her 97th birthday, so this marks the first birthday since her passing. To celebrate her amazing life, I thought I’d post our interview from 2021. (This was originally posted on Vimeo.)
Interview notes
My mother Lillian McCloy is the author of the highly-rated memoir Six Car Lengths Behind an Elephant: Undercover and Overwhelmed as a CIA Wife and Mother. I edited the book, which John le Carré describes as “a charming and unusual portrait of the secret life.”
In our interview, I asked my then 95-year-old mother some readers’ questions about her life as the wife of an undercover CIA officer. I also read a story from her memoir titled “The Vigil," about an experience we shared when I was a senior in high school and we were living in Caracas, Venezuela.
A quick shout-out to Ben Hess for providing the audio of “The Vigil,” excerpted from his Story Geometry podcast episode “The 80’s, Espionage & Editing."
Our prior interview
You can also link to listen to our prior interview (posted on Vimeo). I ask her questions about her life before meeting Frank.
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