Ethical Bearings in an Inter-generational Auto/biography: writing in my mother’s voice

Beatrice Speaking is an account of three years of my mother’s life (from 1945 to 1948). The narrative is written in the first-person voice of Beatrice, my mother (not, of course, her real name), and is framed by a prologue and epilogue in the first-person voice of one of her children (myself) in the present. I have struggled to find a name for the hybrid offspring that I have produced; intergenerational auto/biography is much closer than any of the alternatives. My writing is based very substantially on four sets of letters that came into my hands in 1994 after both of my parents had died. First, there are hundreds of letters written by my mother, the Beatrice of the story, to my father, Tom, who in 1945 began to work for the United Nations in post-war Italy. Almost every word that my character Beatrice speaks is drawn from these letters. There are also Tom’s letters to her. Tom has no speaking voice in my narrative, but his letters are the source of every detail of the (absent) character I draw. Then there are abundant letters between Tom and his lover Heidi (also in Sydney, and a friend of Beatrice).What Heidi says in the book is similarly drawn from her own letters