How do I write about my parents, Jock and Bess’, lives when they are no longer here, ethically, with credibility? How do I use their stories to examine universal issues such as the futility of war, post-traumatic stress disorder and generational trauma without exploiting their lives? And how do I bring them, and the world they inhabited decades before I was born, to life? These were the quandaries I faced when I began writing my debut memoir, Two Generations, which tells the story of my father’s war experience during Japan’s systematic bombing of Darwin, and the impact his trauma had on me.