A little girl asked her father, "What did you do in the war, Daddy?"

Tucking his child in bed, he answered with a fantastic story about a whale. A tale she wholeheartedly believed, until she didn't. He never talked about his war again.

Coming of age during the Vietnam era, the daughter watched war play out on TV, listened to broadcasts of the draft on the radio, faced the mirror of a Vietnam Memorial engraved with names of the dead, joined the protest movement as a secondhand participant. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the mother of three saw young men and women come home damaged in body, mind, and spirit.

The child's original question launched a lifelong quest to understand this thing call war. What was it like, being there, in real time? When her father died in 1992, she believed he'd taken his true war story with him. Only years later would she find a thick packet of letters he'd written to his mother dated from early summer 1944 to April 1946, rich with stories from the Pacific front.

Decades after the fact, the boy who went to war came to life again, took his daughter by the hand, and carried her with him. The two weren't alone on the journey. She'd brought numerous traveling companions along for the wild ride—Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Kurt Vonnegut, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Mary Oliver, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and others. Slipping the last letter back into its envelope, what could she do but write him back, respond to compelling pieces of his story, resume the conversation they never had . . . about his war.

Born in New Jersey in 1952, Lasley F. Gober graduated from Duke University in 1973 and worked briefly in television journalism before earning an MFA in creative writing from Georgia State University. She taught literature, film, and American Studies for twenty years at The Westminster Schools in Atlanta. Upon retirement, she began the correspondence with her dead father, weaving thoughts and memories of her own with the stories he told of World War II.

"After reading and relishing and mulling and cringing at the sixty handwritten letters her father had written his mother from the Pacific front in World War II, Lasley F. Gober decided the only way to deal with the swirl of her emotions was to write him back. So what if nearly seventy years had passed since the homesick boy took pen to paper, or if he'd died two decades before she discovered the letters? This erudite American Studies teacher, with her capacious mind and keen intellect, needed to tell him how it all turned out, even if it meant revealing that one-time heroes—the John Waynes, Charles Lindberghs, and General Douglas MacArthurs—had lost their aura. She struggled with the revealed private sentiments not altogether admirable or in character with the father she knew and adored and came to recognize his 'greatest generation' left behind burn pits of toxic-isms that continue to smolder today. What emerges is a powerful father- daughter colloquy they never got to have." — Hank Klibanoff, coauthor of The Race Beat

"Lasley F. Gober asks the question haunting a generation: what did Daddy do in the war? In the effort to answer her own question, Gober takes us along for a ride through American history and literature, recasting childhood memories with the benefit of wisdom, retelling stories we think we know of war and peace, of Moby-Dick and Slaughterhouse-Five. She invites readers to ask themselves: what were our parents like, before us? What was our country's identity, before us? And finally, how do we live now, in light of all we know of America's secrets, sins, and conspicuous silences? Letters from Inside the Whale is an immersive, ambitious, fiercely personal project by a big-hearted, passionate teacher and writer." — Sanjena Sathian, author of Gold Diggers