MY CIA: A Memoir

In her third book, a memoir, McCord uses the lens of the present to delve into the past: McCord was born in Monrovia, Liberia, Africa, the daughter of a CIA Officer and a beautiful, sheltered, young mother of Irish catholic descent, ten months after the birth of her sister. After a brief stay in Florida, McCord's father would take on his next mission in Katmandu, Nepal. There McCord's mother has a nervous breakdown and the family is secretly flown back to the states where McCord and her sister, fiercely close, would grow up in a "normal" Midwest environment but under and within a shroud of secrecy and propelled by disjointed memories, borrowed histories, and confusing recounts of the past. In My CIA, McCord looks at her life, so far lived with the eyes of a poet, one who knows not how to report and "tell everything" but knows only to tell the truth--of her sorrow, of her hope, of her love and how it finds itself through lyric. In other words, she gives us everything she has to give and finds that the answers are hard won and sometimes in the asking.