Tell it once, properly, in your own words.

“My life hasn’t been that interesting.”

Almost everyone says this, and it is almost always a misunderstanding of what makes a life story worth having. Nobody wants your memoir because you were famous. They want it because you are the only person who can say what it was like to be you - in that town, in that house, in that decade.

The details that turn out to matter most to your family are never the ones you would have listed. Not the promotion: the walk to school. Not the wedding: the fact that your mother kept the good plates on the top shelf for company that never came.

Your grandchildren will not be interested in whether your life was remarkable. They will be interested that it was yours.

“I’m not a writer.”

Good - you are not going to write anything. That is the entire premise. You answer questions out loud, the way you would answer somebody sitting across from you, and the writing happens afterwards from the words you actually said.

People who insist they cannot write are frequently marvellous talkers. Most of the best material in any memoir arrives in a sentence that would never have survived being typed - because typing makes people formal, and talking does not.

“I wouldn’t know where to start.”

You do not have to. Rosie starts, with a question small enough to answer: a house, a school, a job, a car. And when you have answered it she asks about something in your answer, so you are never facing a blank page or a list of topics.

You will not proceed in chronological order and you should not try. Nobody remembers a life in order.

“It feels self-important.”

It might, for the first ten minutes. Then it stops, because what you are actually doing is answering questions - which is a thing you have done all your life without feeling grand about it.

And consider the alternative honestly. The reticence that feels like modesty now reads, in thirty years, as a silence your family cannot do anything about. Every family has a relative about whom nothing is known, and no one ever chose that deliberately.

What you get at the end of it

Written chapters, in your words, that you have read and approved. The original recordings kept alongside them, so your family can hear you tell it. Your photographs with the story of each one attached. A family tree of the people in it. And a book you can download as a PDF, print at home, or have bound properly.

You also get something less obvious, which people mention to us more than anything else: the experience of being asked about your own life by somebody who is not in a hurry. That turns out to be worth having on its own.