How to write your mother's life story
Most families try this once. They sit her down, press record, say "tell us about your life", get twenty polite minutes of dates and places, and never try again. Here is what actually works, learned from two years of interviewing people about their lives.
Start today, badly, rather than properly next year
The single most common regret is not a bad recording. It is no recording. Your phone's voice memo app is enough. Sit somewhere quiet, put the phone face down between you, and stop worrying about the quality of the audio. A rough recording of your mother's actual voice is worth more than a perfect one you never made.
Never open with the sad things
This is the rule I would keep if I could keep only one. People begin with the losses because they feel most important: the deaths, the war, the illness. It closes a person down. The heavy material arrives on its own once someone feels safe, usually an hour later and much deeper than you would have got by asking.
Open somewhere light and alive. Food, a bicycle, a neighbour, a job she hated, a dress she loved.
Chronology is the wrong order
"Start at the beginning" gives you a résumé: born here, moved there, married then. Nobody remembers their life as a timeline. They remember it as scenes. Ask for scenes and you can arrange them later.
The questions that actually work
Small and concrete beats large and abstract, every time. "What was your childhood like?" produces nothing. These produce whole afternoons:
Then, the follow-up that matters more than any question: "What happened next?" and "What did the room look like?" Keep asking those two and she will do the rest.
Twenty minutes, not two hours
Long sessions feel productive and produce tired, flat answers. Short and frequent wins. Twenty minutes over coffee, once or twice a week, gathers far more real material than one exhausting Sunday, and it stops the whole thing feeling like homework, which is the reason most families quietly give up.
Let someone else ask
A daughter asking her mother carries thirty years of shared history into the room. Some things are harder to say to your own child. If a grandchild, a family friend, or a stranger can do the asking, the answers are often looser and more truthful. This is the least intuitive advice here and the most reliably useful.
When she cries
Do not stop the recording, and do not rush to comfort her out of it. Say nothing for a moment. Most people continue on their own, and what follows the silence is usually the thing they most wanted to say. Comfort afterwards, generously. If she wants to stop, stop at once and never push.
Turning hours of talk into a book
This is where most families stall, and it is worth being clear about the work involved. Transcribing is the easy part now; free tools do it well enough. The hard part is that a transcript is not a book. It repeats, it wanders, it starts stories and abandons them, and read cold it is exhausting.
Three routes, plainly:
- Do it yourself. Transcribe, group the scenes by theme rather than date, write a short link between them, and cut ruthlessly. It is genuinely rewarding and genuinely slow.
- Hire a ghostwriter. They interview and write it properly. Prices commonly run from about $3,000 to well over $15,000.
- Use a machine built for it. Disclosure, this is what I make. The Biography Machine does the interviewing itself and writes a 150 to 200 page autobiography in her own voice, printed and bound, for €149. She approves every chapter first, and nothing in it is invented.
See also: the life-story services compared and what a book of someone's life actually costs.