Lily Cavanaugh

Jacky-boy, as his mother, the late Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer, used to say. He had followed Dale through the empty house, upstairs and down, into the basement, dutifully admiring the new furnace and water heater Gilbertson had installed the year before his father’s death, the quality of the repairs he had made since then, the shining grain of the wooden floors, the thickness of the insulation in the attic, the …

Cavanaugh Sawyer is a partial extraction of Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer, explicitly Jack’s mother.

… voice of Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer, the Queen of the B’s, once his only companion in a rapture-flooded, transcendent, rigorously forgotten New Hampshire hotel room, is precisely the voice Jack needs to hear right about now. Lily Cavanaugh is the one person in the world to whom he can spill the ridiculous mess in which he finds himself. Despite the dim, unwelcome awareness of trespassing beyond the borders of strict rationality and therefore bringing further into question his own uncertain sanity, …

Both novels explicitly identify actress Lily Cavanaugh as Jack Sawyer's mother.

… Hudson Parkway, then many more hours pounding up I-95—because Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer had once been happy here. In 1968, the year before Jack’s birth, Lily had been nominated for an Academy Award for her role in a picture called Blaze. Blaze was a better movie than most of Lily’s, and in it she had been able to demonstrate a much richer talent than her usual bad-girl roles had revealed. Nobody expected Lily to win, least of all Lily; but for …

Both novels explicitly identify Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer as Jack Sawyer’s actress mother.

The smile had met only the minimum standards for graciousness. “I suppose that’s how old you have to be to remember Lily Cavanaugh,” she had said to Jack as soon as they were alone in their rooms.

Both novels explicitly identify actress Lily Cavanaugh as Jack Sawyer's mother.