How to help someone tell their story

Ask around and you'll hear versions of the same handful of sentences from families who've tried to get a parent or grandparent talking about their past.

"He says his life wasn't that interesting." "She deflects: makes a joke, asks about the kids, and we're onto something else." "He says he doesn't remember much, and I think he's embarrassed about it." "Every time I try, I get 'you already know all this.'" "I don't know what to ask next." The same objections show up wherever people compare notes on this, from caregiving forums to oral-history handbooks, and the useful thing about that is what it tells you: this is the normal opening position of a person who has never been asked to consider their own life as a subject.

Usually the stories are still there, and the invitation arrived in a shape they couldn't accept. Here's what tends to work instead.

Take "it wasn't interesting" seriously, then ignore it

When someone says their life was ordinary, they're not fishing. They mean it. They're comparing themselves to the people who get books written about them, and by that standard a machinist from Toledo comes up short.

The mistake is arguing. "Dad, your life was fascinating!" is an abstract claim, and he'll bat it away with an abstract denial, and you're now having a debate rather than a conversation.

Don't argue the premise. Go around it. Don't ask for his life; ask about one specific hour of it. "What did the shop floor sound like?" isn't a request for a memoir. It's a question he can answer without ever agreeing that he's interesting. He'll tell you about the noise, and then about the foreman, and twenty minutes later he's told you three things you didn't know. The self-assessment never gets updated and it doesn't need to.

Ask one question, not for a project

The other reason people deflect is scale. "I want to record your life story" describes a commitment with no visible edges: how many sessions, how long, what happens if they say something wrong, who's going to read it. Deflection is a reasonable response to a project you didn't agree to.

So don't propose the project. Ask one question, on an ordinary Tuesday, about something small. Our guide to recording your parents' life story makes the case for starting before you feel ready, and this is the version that asks nothing of anyone's calendar: one question about the first apartment.

If it goes somewhere, you've started. If it doesn't, nothing was lost, and you can ask a different one next week. The families who end up with something usually started small and kept going, with or without a good plan.

Follow the detail, not the outline

Here's the failure I see most, and it's the diligent person's failure.

You've got a list. You ask question four. She answers, and somewhere in the answer she mentions a woman named Dolores, and you don't stop, because you're already looking at question five. The list is doing its job and you're missing the story.

Dolores is the story. "Who was Dolores?" is the best question available to you at that moment and it isn't on any sheet, because no sheet knew about her. StoryCorps, which has recorded hundreds of thousands of these conversations, builds its whole interview advice around this: ask what things looked like and smelled like, and when a name goes by, stop and ask who that was.

If you take one thing from this: a list gets you in the door and then you should mostly abandon it. Our questions to ask aging parents are written to be starting points, not a script to get through.

Let them be off the record with you

Some of the reluctance is about who's asking.

Parents censor themselves in front of their children, habitually and often without noticing. Some of it started when you were eight and the story was too adult for you, and the omission simply never got revised. Some of it is that a parent is supposed to be the competent one, and the year everything went wrong doesn't fit that job description. And for a certain generation, particularly women, talking about yourself at length was taught as boastful.

You can name this and it helps more than you'd expect. Telling someone plainly that you're hoping they'll talk about it the way they'd talk to a friend rather than to their kid can give them permission they've been waiting decades for. So does saying out loud that they can skip anything they don't want to answer. People tend to open up faster when they know exactly where the exit is.

It's also worth noticing who else can get answers you can't. A grandchild asking "what was your school like?" gets a real answer, because your father performs less for a twelve-year-old and explains more.

Record it, and keep it short

Whatever you do, hit record, and do it with their knowledge. That also tells them the story is worth keeping. Notes lose the thing you'll most want later, which is the way they said it. A phone face-down on the table is enough.

And keep it short. Twenty minutes beats two hours; a long session tires everyone out and makes the next one feel like an appointment. A short conversation that happens monthly is worth more than the ambitious afternoon that never gets scheduled.

If you'd rather not be the interviewer

Some people love doing this. If that's you, the advice above is most of what you need, and the phone in your pocket is the rest.

But there's another version of this where you sit down with your mother, ask your three questions, run dry, and spend the rest of the visit aware that you're the reason it's awkward. That's the gap Loristry fills: it does the asking by voice, including the follow-up you'd have missed, so you can just be her son.

Either way, the part that matters is the same, and it's smaller than the project in your head. One question, this week, about something specific. The rest tends to follow.

— Scott