What to actually ask
Open with a place or an object, never a feeling. "What did the kitchen smell like on a Sunday" gets an answer. "What was your childhood like" gets "fine". Then ask what happened next, and keep asking. These MemoriesBox question lists are free to use with any recorder.
Why the long lists do not help
Search for questions to ask your grandmother and you will find lists of thirty-five, fifty, a hundred. One service publishes eight hundred and one. We are not going to publish another one, because the list has never been the hard part. Nobody has ever abandoned a recording because they ran out of questions.
The hard part arrives about four seconds after the question. She says "we didn't have much, but we managed," and there is a pause, and you look down and read out the next question on the list. That pause was the story. Everything that matters was one sentence further in, and the list took you away from it.
47% of Americans regret not recording or documenting a conversation with someone who has since died, and 59% have never done it at all (YouGov, June 2022, n=6,090). The second number is the interesting one. Most people who want to do this never start, and most people who start stop in the first week — usually after one flat conversation that felt like an interview neither of them enjoyed.
A life story interview is a recorded conversation, usually spread over several sessions, in which one person answers questions about their own life while another listens and follows up. The following is the method, not a list. Every page in this section carries a two-column table: the question, and what to say once they have answered.
The three rings
A life does not get told from birth forwards. It gets told from the outside in, and there are three rings.
Ring one is place and object. What the room looked like, what was on the table, which door you came in by, what the bus cost. These are answerable by anybody, including someone who is certain they have nothing to say, because they do not require the person to have an opinion about their own life. Start here every time.
Ring two is events and people. The first job, the move, the wedding, the year the factory closed, the neighbour upstairs. This is most of the recording, and you can usually get there twenty minutes into the first session.
Ring three is judgement. Regret, money, faith, the person the family does not talk about, what they were afraid of. This ring opens late, sometimes in session four, sometimes never. Asking a ring-three question in the first ten minutes is the single most common way to end a conversation before it starts.
The shape of a session
Start here
| Ask | Then ask |
|---|---|
| What did the kitchen smell like on a Sunday? | Who was cooking, and what were you supposed to be doing while they did it? |
| Which door did you use to come into the house? | What was the first thing you saw when it opened? |
| What was on the walls? | Who chose it, and did anyone argue about it? |
| What did you get for your birthday when you were about ten? | Where did it go afterwards? |
The middle of the conversation
| Ask | Then ask |
|---|---|
| What was your first week of work like? | What did you get wrong in the first week? |
| Who lived upstairs? | What could you hear through the ceiling? |
| How did the two of you meet? | What did you think was going to happen next, at the time? |
| What did your mother do all day? | Which part of it would you refuse to do now? |
| What was the first thing you bought with your own money? | What did that cost, and how long had you saved? |
Questions to save for later
| Ask | Then ask |
|---|---|
| Was there a year you would rather not talk about? | You do not have to say what happened. Which year was it? |
| What did you want that you did not get? | Who else knew you wanted it? |
| Is there anything the family has never been told? | Do you want it kept until after you are gone, or not kept at all? |
You have earned the third table when they start telling you things you did not ask for. Until that happens, stay in the first two.
The follow-ups that do most of the work
There are about six of these and they cover almost every answer you will ever get.
| The follow-up | What it does |
|---|---|
| And then what happened? | Turns a fact into a sequence. Most one-sentence answers become five minutes with this alone. |
| Who else was there? | Puts a second person in the room. Names produce stories the way nothing else does. |
| What did that cost? | Dates the memory precisely and always arrives with a scene attached. |
| Where were you standing? | Moves them back into a physical place, which is where the detail is stored. |
| What did it sound like? | Sound and smell recall are far more reliable than dates. Ask for those instead. |
| Say nothing at all. | Count to seven. Most people fill a silence, and what they fill it with is better than your next question. |
There is a seventh, and it is slightly underhand. Be wrong on purpose. Say "so you would have taken the bus into town," when you know perfectly well it was the train. People who will not volunteer anything will always correct you, and the correction runs for two minutes.
The order to record a life in
Do not follow a syllabus. Follow the last session.
- Session one: the house. Walk through it room by room, starting at the front door. See the first twenty minutes.
- Session two: the street and the school. Neighbours, shops, the route, who they were frightened of.
- Session three: work. The first job, the money, the hands.
- Session four: how they met, and the years just after.
- Session five onwards: everything they mentioned in passing and did not explain.
That last one is the whole method. Keep a running list of the half-sentences — "that was before my brother's business went," "we didn't speak for a while after that" — and open the next session with one of them. A list you built from their own answers beats any list you found online, including this one.
The pages in this section
| The situation | The page |
|---|---|
| You have twenty minutes and no idea how to start | The first twenty minutes |
| They say there is nothing to tell | When they deflect |
| You are not close to this parent | A parent you are not close to |
| Memory is going | Questions that still work |
| Time is short, or not short at all | Before they die |
| They left one country for another | Leaving home |
| Your grandmother | Questions to ask your grandmother |
| Your grandfather | Questions to ask your grandfather |
The question that usually works when nothing else does
What did that cost?
It is not really a question, it is a lever, and it works on any answer in any language. Prices are stored with unusual precision — people who cannot place a decade will tell you a loaf was four kopecks, or that the rent was eleven and six, or what a bicycle cost in the year they bought it. And a price never comes alone. It arrives with the shop, the queue, the wage it came out of, and the argument about whether it was worth it. When a conversation goes flat, ask what something cost and it starts again.
If they say there is nothing to tell
Almost everyone says it. It is usually not refusal and it is not modesty either. It is the correct answer to a question that was too big to answer, and the fix is to ask something smaller and more concrete rather than to insist their life was interesting. The counter-moves for each kind of deflection are set out on what to ask when they say there is nothing to tell.
Questions people ask
What is a good first question for a life story interview?
Ask about a place or an object. "Which door did you use to come into the house you grew up in?" or "what was on the kitchen table when you got home from school?" Both are answerable in one breath, neither requires them to judge their own life, and both open onto everything else.
How many questions should I ask in one sitting?
Three or four. A good session is forty minutes and covers less ground than you expect, because the follow-ups take the time. If you get through fifteen questions in an hour you were reading a list, not having a conversation.
Should I send the questions in advance?
Usually not. People who prepare tend to arrive with a summary of their life rather than the life itself. The exception is anything needing documents or dates — family names, medical history, who is who in the photographs — where a day's notice genuinely helps.
What if they get upset during the interview?
Stop asking and stay. Do not apologise repeatedly or turn it into a fuss, and do not rush to the next question. Most people cry for about a minute and then continue, and many say afterwards that it was the part they were glad to have said. If they want to stop, stop, and leave the recording as it is.
Related: The first twenty minutes · When they say there is nothing to tell · How to record your parents' life story · Who agreed to be recorded
MemoriesBox runs this as a long guided interview across many sessions, keeps the person's own voice rather than a transcript, and lets the family ask it questions later. Hosted in the EU. $139 a year, first 14 days free, cancel anytime.