50 Questions to Ask Your Parents About Their Life

How to use this list

Six things, learned the hard way, that matter more than which questions you pick.

Do not work through it in order. A list read out in sequence produces an interrogation. Pick two or three from the childhood section, ask them properly, and follow wherever the answer goes. You will get through six questions in an hour and that is a good hour.

Start with the easy years. Childhood, first job, first car. Nobody can answer “tell me about your life” cold, and legacy questions asked in the first ten minutes get a polite non-answer. Warm up on the concrete.

Ask about process, not feeling. “What did you actually do all day at the plant?” gets forty minutes. “What was it like working at the plant?” gets “oh, it was all right”. The feeling arrives on its own, in the middle of the process answer, and it is far more truthful when it does.

Do not correct them. Not the date, not the name, not the version of the story you have heard differently. Being corrected is the single fastest way to end a recording session.

Let silence run. Count to five before you fill a pause. Most of the best material in any interview arrives after a silence that felt too long to the person asking.

Record it. Any phone will do. You will not remember it as well as you think, and the way they said it is half of what you are trying to keep.

Childhood and the house they grew up in

Start here, always. These are the easiest questions in the world to answer and they warm somebody up faster than anything else on this page.

What was the house you grew up in like? Walk me through the front door.
Where did everybody sleep?
What did the kitchen smell like on an ordinary weekday?
Who else lived with you, or was always there?
What did you do all day in the summer holidays?
What was the walk to school like?
Were you frightened of anything in that house?
What did your family do on a Sunday?
What was the first thing you remember buying with your own money?
Was there a room you were not allowed in?

Their parents and grandparents

The highest-value section on the page, because your parent is the last person who can answer any of it. Ask these even if you ask nothing else.

What did your father do for work, and did you ever go with him?
What was your mother like when you were small - not as a mother, as a person?
What did your parents argue about?
What do you know about your grandparents? Did you meet them?
Where did the family come from before that?
Was there money, or was it tight? How did you know?
What did your parents want for you that you did not want for yourself?
Is there something you wish you had asked your own parents?
What did your mother do all day?
Who in the family was everybody a bit afraid of?

Being young: work, friends and going out

The years your family knows least about, because they happened before you existed and stopped being mentioned once life got busy.

What was your first job, and what did it pay?
What did you actually do all day in that job?
Who taught you how to do it?
Who was your closest friend at twenty? What happened to them?
Where did people go on a Friday night?
What was the first car, and what went wrong with it?
What did you think you were going to be?
What did you do that your parents never found out about?
When did you first feel like an adult?
What music was on, and did you like it or just tolerate it?

Meeting, marrying and raising children

Ask both parents separately if you can. The two accounts of how they met will not match, and the discrepancy is worth recording on its own.

How did you and Mum/Dad actually meet? Not the short version.
What did you think of them at first?
What did your parents make of them?
What was the wedding like, and what went wrong on the day?
What was the first place you lived together?
What was it like the first night you had a baby in the house?
What were you most worried about as a young parent?
What do you think you got right with us? What would you do differently?
What was the hardest year, and what got you through it?
What was an ordinary Tuesday like when we were small?

Looking back

Leave these until somebody is comfortable - usually a session or two in. Asked cold, they produce a polite non-answer.

What are you proudest of that nobody would guess?
What is the best decision you ever made?
Who influenced you most, and did you ever tell them?
What has surprised you about getting older?
What did you believe at thirty that you no longer believe?
What do you know now that would have been useful to know then?
Is there anybody you have lost touch with that you think about?
What do you want your grandchildren to know about you?
What is a small thing that has made you happy for most of your life?
Is there a story about our family that you think has been told wrong?

The four follow-ups that matter more than the list

Fifty questions will get you fifty answers. What turns answers into a story is what you say next - and it is nearly always one of these four:

“What do you mean by that?” Used on any phrase they threw away. Half the good material in any life is hiding inside a subordinate clause.
“Who else was there?” Turns an event into people, and people are what a memoir is made of.
“What happened next?” The most underrated question in interviewing. Most people stop a story one beat before the part that matters.
“Can you describe it?” Pushes an abstraction back into a room with furniture in it - which is what your family will actually remember.

If you take nothing else from this page

The follow-up is the whole job. A stranger with these fifty questions and no curiosity will get less out of your father than you will get with five questions and the patience to ask “and then what?” four times.

That is also, precisely, the thing MyLifeMemoir automates. Rosie asks a question, listens to the answer, and builds the next one out of it - so the follow-up happens every time, including on the evenings when you are tired and would have let it go. How that works.