At her daughter Candice’s first birthday party in 1987, Laura Elliott was surrounded by the ordinary markers of a happy family celebration: a birthday cake, candles, relatives, and a toddler just learning to walk.

In the room was a wooden bench Candace had made with Elliott’s father, Hans. Building benches with his children and grandchildren was simply something Hans did, and Elliott had never thought much about it.

Then her brother Mike looked at the bench.

In Dear Laura: A Lost Chapter of WWII, which Kirkus Reviews calls “an evocative tale of history and family,” Elliott re-creates the moment:

Candice pushed my hands away and used a little wooden bench to steady herself. I smiled at her, one proud mama. Making wooden benches with Dad was another family tradition…

Just before I lifted Candice into her highchair and lit her candles to sing our family birthday songs, Mike glanced at the bench and offhandedly whispered, “Concentration camp bench.”

“What are you talking about?” …

“Ask Dad,” my brother said.”

That brief exchange opened a door Elliott would spend nearly four decades walking through.

Elliott knew her father had been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, but knew nothing about what had happened to him. “No one ever talked about it.”

At the time Elliott was living in Los Angeles while her parents were in Chicago. After the birthday party, she wrote her father with a simple request: “Tell me about the first bench you ever built.” It turns out Hans learned to make the benches while at the Japanese men’s POW camp, developing what her father called a “little side business” constructing them.

And that initial exchange of missives began some 30 years of correspondence. “I didn’t plan on writing it or publishing it,” she says. “I just wanted to know more about my dad.” Hans, she discovered, was ready to tell her. What began as a daughter’s simple curiosity about her father would eventually become a book.

Hans was a teenager when the Japanese captured him in Java in 1942, but Elliot found there was much more to the story. Through years of research, Elliott learned that the Hasenstabs—her father’s family—were among five families of Dutch engineers transported from Indonesia to Japan. The engineers were forced to work for the Sumitomo Corporation on secret military-related projects. The exact nature of those projects remains one of the book’s mysteries.

Hans couldn’t solve the mystery, as he was the teenage son of one of the engineers, not one of the men who worked in the lab each day. Elliott’s research led to possible connections with Japanese radar and nuclear research, but some questions may never be answered.

That uncertainty was difficult for someone with a journalistic instinct to keep digging.

Elliot didn’t begin her career as a writer. She grew up in Chicago, studied industrial design at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, then later started her own industrial design business. But a serious automobile accident led her to redirect her career into graphic design, digital media, and the emerging online world.

The push toward writing came from one of her children’s kindergarten teachers, who gave Elliot a copy of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. She employed Cameron’s practice of writing daily “morning pages.”

While working for E! Entertainment Television’s online operation, storytelling became a larger part of Elliot’s work, whether she was dealing with words, images, or interactive technology. That led her to the Los Angeles Times, where from 2006 to 2009 she worked in the newspaper’s digital and multimedia operation, initially as a designer.

“I found out that I was hired because I was also a writer,” Elliott reveals. That led to writing for the Times, including travel pieces. She later moved into ghostwriting, penning more than 30 books for other people, including business books, self-help books, and memoirs.

Only in retrospect does Elliott realize that her most important education in interviewing had taken place not in a newsroom, but with Hans. “I didn’t realize that my master’s was my work with my dad,” she says. “I was asking him questions.”

The breakup of her longtime marriage eventually led to Elliott discovering the book she thought she was writing about her father was also about her. Unfortunately, she found her experience writing magazine and web articles didn’t translate well to writing a novel. Yet friends urged her to continue. “Laura, write another way,” she remembers them telling her. “Go write as a screenwriter. Finish it. Do it as a screenplay.” So she did, hiring a screenwriting mentor, developing a treatment, and using it as a framework before taking major research trips to Indonesia and Australia.

By 2016, she thought she was close to finishing the screenplay, but she workshopped it with an experienced screenwriter who said something that would change the course of the work: What was missing in the story was her.

“I thought I was, like, at the finish line,” Elliott recalls. Instead, she realized she “needed to be on the page.” That transformed Dear Laura; it became not simply an account of a teenage POW but also a parallel story of father and daughter experiencing loss, decades apart.

Their letters and conversations began to work both ways. “I helped him remember, and he helped me heal,” Elliott says. “It was a beautiful way of getting to know someone you love, really know them.”

Elliott traveled widely, effectively circling the globe twice in the process, she says. Along the way, faith became an important part of her journey. Before her initial research journey to Indonesia in 2014, a woman shared a prayer with Elliott: “Lord, please bring Laura the people she needs and bring her to the people who need her.”

Elliott carried that prayer with her. “If it weren’t for my deepening relationship [with God], I would have stopped,” she says.

Though he would not live to see the book completed, Hans knew it was taking shape. In early 2016, Elliott visited her father for his 92nd birthday, giving him a letter explaining how she was going to put herself in the story. “He loved it, and he gave me his blessing,” she says.

Hans died that July.

Dear Laura was finally published in 2025, winning the 2026 Indies Today Book Award and becoming one of six finalists for the Kirkus Indie Awards 2026 in the memoir category.Elliott narrated the audiobook herself, calling it “the most exhausting, exciting, amazing, heart-wrenching, lovely thing I’ve ever done in my career.”

And she’s already writing again, a book about her aunt, who left Indonesia for England before World War II and became stranded there when war broke out.

Elliott names Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fannie Flagg, and Sue Monk Kidd among her writing influences. She also cites Jim Trelease, who championed reading aloud to children, and Lynne Reid Banks and Roald Dahl, whose books she read to her own children.

Elliott lives in Santa Cruz, California, with her husband. Her blended family includes her two daughters, his three children, and grandchildren. They love kayaking, cross-country skiing, and hanging out with family. Family connection is important to Elliott, who found a profound connection with her father for her first memoir.

All it took for that story to come to life was a birthday party, a wooden bench, and two words from her brother: “Ask Dad.”

Alec Harvey is a freelance writer based in Birmingham, Alabama. He is a former president of the Society for Features Journalism.