How to write your father's life story
He will tell you there is nothing to tell. Almost every father says it, and almost none of them mean it. Here is how to get past that sentence, from two years of interviewing people about their lives.
"There's nothing to tell" is not a refusal
It usually means one of three things: he does not think an ordinary life counts as a story, he does not know where you want him to start, or he suspects you are asking him to talk about feelings and would rather do almost anything else.
All three have the same solution. Do not ask him about his life. Ask him about work, machines, trouble, and other people. His life arrives anyway, sideways, which is how most men tell it.
Ask about the job, not the childhood
Fathers who go silent at "what was your childhood like" will talk for an hour about a job. What the work actually involved, who was impossible to work with, the thing that went wrong, the boss he respected, what his hands looked like at the end of a shift, what he was paid and what it bought.
Objects, vehicles, and trouble
Ask about a first car, a tool, a bicycle, a motorbike, a watch. Then ask what happened to it. The story is never about the object.
Do it beside him, not across from him
A recorder on a table between two chairs feels like an interview and men often close down. Driving, walking, washing up, fixing something: the words come easier when the eyes have somewhere else to go. Record on a phone in your pocket, with his knowledge.
Never open with the losses
His father, the war, the illness, the divorce, the child he lost. These are the reasons you want the book, and they are the worst possible opening. Warm up somewhere light. The heavy material comes on its own, usually about forty minutes in, and far deeper than any direct question would have got.
Twenty minutes at a time
Short and repeated beats one long session, always. Two hours produces polite, tired, flattened answers and the feeling of homework. Twenty minutes a week, over months, produces a book.
Ask the same story twice, months apart
Not to catch him out. The second telling almost always contains something the first did not, and where the two versions differ is often exactly where the real feeling sits.
Then the hard part: it is not a book yet
You will end up with hours of recordings that repeat, wander, and start stories they never finish. Transcription is easy and free now. Turning a transcript into something a grandchild will read is the work. Three routes:
- Yourself. Group the scenes by meaning rather than date, write links between them, cut hard. Slow, rewarding, and the reason most attempts stop here.
- A ghostwriter. They do it properly, commonly from $3,000 to well beyond $15,000.
- A machine built for it. Disclosure, this is mine. The Biography Machine does the interviewing and writes a 150 to 200 page book in his own voice, printed, €149. He approves every chapter, and nothing is invented.
See also: the same guide for your mother · life-story services compared