Question pack
Questions to Ask Your Father About His Life
Interview questions built for fathers who answer in one word: boyhood, work, becoming a dad, and the things he keeps but never explains.
Fathers are famously hard interviews. Ask an open question and you get "not much to tell." But the same man will talk for twenty minutes about a carburetor, a foreman he had in 1974, or the right way to sharpen a chisel. The trick is to ask about the concrete thing and let the life story ride in on it.
Every question below points at something he can picture: a car, a paycheck, a jobsite, a road. Start with whichever section matches what he already likes to talk about, and work outward from there.
Boyhood
- What did you and the other boys do in summer when no adults were watching?
- What was the first thing you built, fixed, or took apart?
- Who taught you to drive, and in what car?
- What did your father do for a living, and did you ever watch him do it?
- What did you get in real trouble for as a boy?
- What was the best thing you ever owned as a kid, and how did you get it?
Work and what it cost
- What was your first real job, and what did it pay?
- Who gave you your first break, and why do you think they did?
- What was the hardest physical work you ever did?
- What did you miss at home because of work?
- What tool or skill from your working life do you still use?
- Was there a job you turned down that you still think about?
Becoming a father
- Where were you when you found out you were going to be a dad?
- What did your own father do that you decided to repeat — and what did you decide never to repeat?
- What did you do with us that your dad never did with you?
- What was the family car when we were small, and where did it take us?
- What were you trying to figure out how to pay for in those years?
- What's one thing you did for us that we never noticed?
The things he never says out loud
- What's the oldest thing you own, and why has it survived every move?
- Is there a place you still go back to — a town, a shop, a stretch of road? What's there?
- What decision did you make that changed everything for the family, and what did you weigh it against?
- Whose photograph do you keep, and where do you keep it?
- What did you do well for years that nobody ever thanked you for?
- Is there a song or a smell that stops you cold? Where does it take you?
How to use these questions
Side by side beats face to face. Ask these in the car, in the garage, over a project, at a ballgame — anywhere he doesn't have to look at you while he answers. Direct eye contact turns a question into an interrogation for a lot of men of his generation.
Expect the first answer to be short, and don't rush to fill the gap. Count to five in your head. Fathers often give the real answer on the second pass, after the standard-issue one. And take a single question seriously as a whole visit's work: one good story about the foreman in 1974 is worth more than fifteen clipped answers to fifteen questions.