The last decades of the twentieth century have seen an unprecedented rise in genres of life writing.    Through these narratives it can be seen how personal storytelling functions as a crucial element in the establishing of new identities. Yet, this is not without challenging issues of human ethics. In What Country Is This? Caterina Edwards takes on the role of historian as she searches for her mother’s Istrian past. The gradual loss of her mother’s memory to Alzheimer’s triggers in Edwards the need to understand the woman her mother had been and tell her story. To do this it was imperative that Edwards search for the history and culture that had shaped her mother and in so doing re-construct her own history, her own story. The gradual loss of her mother’s memory is juxtaposed in alternating chapters to the absence of documented historical memory regarding Italian Istrians.

The objective of this paper is to contemplate two fundamental issues. The first is the ethical dilemma of writing about others in our lives who have shaped us decisively. As an autobiographer is it possible to tell a story without violating the other’s privacy? The second issue concerns the role of history in autobiography and takes into consideration the use of outside sources such as archives, historical documents and photos in the re-creation of a personal past as an act of historical creation, using as an example the case of the lost history of the Italian Istrians in What Country Is This?