A Trick of the Light is the memoir of Australian-born Carolyn Polizzotto that pieces together a hard-won recollection of her postwar childhood in the 1950s. It is interesting as a memoir because its point is what cannot be recalled about one's life, and why. She candidly reveals that there is much in her childhood which she is unable to remember (and in fact much of what she writes is second-hand information from her parents). Near the beginning of the book she asks: 'Why is there a gap where my childhood should be?' (27) Her memoir is an exploration of this question and an attempt to redeem her childhood memories. Her thinking about her lack of memory takes an existential turn and it is a pleasure to read her unique take on how her consciousness and memory were shaped in relation to language and silence.

Polizzotto's childhood was dominated by a war that was never spoken about but that pervaded family life. She recalls that 'war was all around me and the fact that it was not spoken of made it more real, not less' (21). Her father had served in the Australian navy in World War Two and returned home with post-traumatic stress disorder. His disorder was not acknowledged, however, and he dealt with his trauma through silence and withdrawal. Interestingly, while specific references to her father are infrequent and peripheral in Polizzotto's memoir, his influence within her story, as with his influence over his family in the 1950s, is heavy and sombre. While he is mostly absent throughout these pages, the sense that the reader gets of his pervasive effect over the family is all the more powerful, and is skilfully invoked by the author.

Polizzotto's father remained silent and withdrawn, and her mother dealt with him in a similarly evasive way. Polizzotto recalls her as always whispering to the children, shooing them out of the way and tiptoeing around her volatile husband. In this way her mother seemed to fade away, to lose herself to her husband's problems. Polizzotto, too, was deeply affected by her father's moods and by the oppressive atmosphere in the household. She recalls that she was always nervously attuned to her father's state of mind. Fear and tension were an everyday undercurrent that she took to be normal. Ritual and superficial pleasantries were necessary to disguise underlying problems and to suppress a truth which threatened to surface at any moment - that perhaps the war was not justified, that there were no real victors, or that, in the minds of these generations, it was not over.

Polizzotto explains that this silence was used to raise a new generation of children with a clean slate - that is, the children were the clean slate. She believes that her generation functioned as a language, giving meaning and justification to the war: