Secret agent.

FBI Girl

How I Learned to Crack My Father's Code

Maura Conlon-McIvor

Warner Books, $23, 320 pp.

As synchronicity would have it, about the time I started FBI Girl, a coming-of-age story by the daughter of an FBI agent, I met a man whose parents had been members of the Communist party during the J. Edgar Hoover era. When he heard what I was reading, he told of how his family had lived in fear of the FBI, his father blacklisted, his mother losing her job. Just what is this book about? he asked.

FBI Girl is no expose, I told him. But it is very much concerned with people who are outside what author Maura Conlon-McIvor (with whom I have a passing acquaintance) calls the "stratosphere of normalcy," whether they are Communists, gangsters, or simply those unable to function in the mainstream. Like, for example, her brother Joey, who was born with Down syndrome.

FBI Girl is told in the words of a child: Maura Conlon, an Irish Catholic girl growing up in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s. Her father is Special Agent Joseph Conlon, and he's a tough guy to get to know. No matter how hard young Maura tries, her father never gives her the attention she craves. Just to whom do those crackling voices on the car radio belong, she asks. No response. She asks again, at which point she's told not to end a question with "huh."

FBI Girl joins an honored tradition of literary daughters trying to fathom critical, remote fathers. Harper Lee, Louisa May Alcott, and Emily Dickinson are a few names that come to mind.

Like other daughters before her, young Maura understands all about her father's moods. He is a FBI agent, after all. A special agent. He must be on guard against all the unsavory types lurking beyond the gate. He simply hasn't time for chitchat and sugary, female emotions.

In the beginning, Maura models herself on her taciturn father, designing a special FBI wardrobe, logging entries in her FBI notebook. She develops as much reverence for the picture of J. Edgar Hoover hanging above the television set as she does for the statues of Jesus and Mary placed throughout the house.

Indeed, the axis upon which this story turns are these two monoliths of power--the church and the FBI--and how the heroine navigates the perilous course between.

"Daddy can be difficult sometimes," her mother gently explains, trying to account for her father's remoteness. "Who knows why he's that way?"

"Maybe," says young Maura, "it comes from fighting crime all day. It must be tough."

Or maybe, the adult Maura suggests, her father's malaise is a result of the immense energy it takes to not only split the world into good and bad but to maintain that split. It's no surprise that J. Edgar would applaud such an endeavor, but so would the Catholic Church, if the public school "devils" Maura is warned about are any indication.

While both church and state are guilty of moral absolutism, FBI Girl paints a more complex picture where the church is concerned. When her beloved uncle, Fr. Jack, is murdered in his Queens rectory, Maura wants to know what to do. "We will pray for the man who committed this horrendous act," her mother says. "Pray for the murderer?" says Maura, in disbelief.

Yes, the murderer. Aren't forgiveness and unconditional love central to the faith? This is the deeper message that Joey--the Down syndrome brother, the misfit and "retard"--brings so poignantly to the family. Maura may have trouble reaching her Dad, but Joey is always there for her. When she sits down to play the piano, her brother comes up and throws his arms around her:

     "Fe-eh," he says. That means "funny" in Down syndrome talk.
     "Who's fe-eh?"
     He points to me. "You fe-eh."
     "Me fe-eh? I say you fe-eh."
     I reach out to tickle him. Joey is extremely ticklish, laughing
   even before you touch his side. Joey wipes a kiss on my cheek. "Ah,
   Waah." "Waah" is his name for "Maura."

"Sometimes," young Maura writes, "I wonder what I'd do without Joey. It's almost as if he takes the kisses Dad gives him and distributes them to the rest of us." Indeed, Joey is the real mover and shaker of the story, more powerful than the church and the Federal Bureau of Investigation combined. He's the only one who is able to get through to Joseph Conlon senior, "spreading his hands flat over Dad's cheeks like a magician."

A big part of Conlon-McIvor's journey is moving away from her identification with the power monoliths of the story and into the role of protector (in itself a form of power) for Joey and others like him. In the process, she opens her mind and heart to those dangerous Others.

The best memoirs obliterate the line between past and present, making the dim corridors of yesteryear more real than the pages in the reader's hands. Conlon-McIvor accomplishes this in the passages about Joey, which are deeply moving. In other places, though, the prose often seems reminiscent of Angela's Ashes, complete with Frank McCourt's trademark run-on sentences. Maybe it's not possible to read (or write) an Irish Catholic coming-of-age story without thinking of McCourt's remarkable work. But this is a very different story, and at times that voice does not seem representative of the author's deeper self. Conlon-McIvor hints that her next book will spotlight a trip she made to County Clare, Ireland, the land of her ancestors. Perhaps during that journey FBI Girl will find a vital piece of evidence that will lead to an even deeper excavation of heart and soul--and to the voice needed to tell the story.

Robin Antepara is a freelance writer based in Tokyo. She teaches at Waseda University, and attends Pacifica Graduate Institute, where she met Maura Conlon-McIvor in the PhD program in depth psychology.