A memoir in Farsi, in your parent's own words

Almost every service that turns a life into a book works in English. If your mother thinks in Farsi, that is not a small detail. It is the difference between her story and a summary of her story.

What gets lost in English

A person telling their life in a second language tells a shorter, flatter version of it. This is not about fluency. It happens to people who have lived in English for forty years and run companies in it.

The vocabulary of a childhood lives in the language of that childhood. The name of the street. What the bread was called. The song her mother sang while doing something else. In English she reaches for those and finds a description of them instead — a kind of flatbread, a song my mother used to sing — and the listener nods, and the thing itself is gone.

Humour goes first. Then grief. Both need a register a second language rarely has, so what is left is the events: dates, cities, who married whom. That is a CV, not a memoir.

And a second language makes people narrate rather than remember. They choose words they are sure of, which means choosing what they have said before. You get the anecdote she has told a hundred times, polished smooth, instead of the thing underneath it she has never said out loud in any language.

Three things "in Farsi" has to mean

Captured in Farsi. She speaks in her own words, at her own speed, with nobody translating in the moment and nobody waiting.

Written in Farsi. The story is shaped in the language it was told in. Not translated into English to be organised and then translated back — every pass through another language is a pass through somebody else's idea of what she meant.

Printed in Farsi. Right to left, in a typeface built for Persian. Moonray sets its books in Vazirmatn, which is also the typeface this website uses, so the page you read here and the page she holds are set the same way.

Three things look like this and are not:

• Recording in Farsi, then translating. You end up with an English book. Her

grandchildren can read it. She cannot.

• An English service with a relative interpreting. The interpreter becomes

the author. She stops telling her life and starts answering her child.

• Machine-translating an English memoir into Persian. It reads like an

appliance manual, and she will be too polite to say so.

How Moonray does it

Sara is an AI interviewer, and she says so in her first message. She talks with the storyteller on Telegram — text or voice notes, whichever they prefer. She never telephones anyone.

The conversation is one to one. No family group chat, nobody else in the room. That matters more than it sounds: a parent tells a different version of their life when a child is listening.

It happens across weeks rather than in one sitting. Sara keeps track of what has been told and what has not, and comes back to the gaps — so the book is a whole life in order, not the four stories that happened to come up.

You read each story on a dashboard as it is captured, and can edit and approve it. Nothing prints without your go-ahead. Every voice note is encrypted and kept in a private archive, so the recording of her actual voice outlives the book.

Then it is printed as a hardcover and posted to the country you choose.

$99 covers a year of conversations, the digital book and one hardcover, with shipping included. Import duty, where a country charges it, is not included. $59 adds each extra hardcover.

And $59 adds a second edition in the other language. For a diaspora family that is usually the whole point: the Farsi book for her and for the relatives who read Farsi, an English edition for grandchildren who do not. Same memoir, two books, neither one a compromise.

There is a full refund within thirty days, from the dashboard. Approving the book does not end that window — sending it to the printer does.

What it does not do

• Sara does not make phone calls. Text and voice notes on Telegram, nothing else.
• She speaks Persian and English today. Not yet Arabic, Turkish, Armenian or

Azerbaijani, all of which people have reason to ask for.

• She is not a therapist and not a genealogist. She will not build your family

tree or find your grandfather's records.

• She is an AI. If what your father wants is his son asking the questions, this

is the wrong thing to buy him, and we would rather say so here than take the $99.

If you would rather do it yourself

You do not need us for this, and doing it badly still beats not doing it. If you are going to try it alone, the things that actually make the difference:

• Record in Farsi, even if you plan to translate later. You can always

translate a recording. You cannot un-flatten a story told in the wrong language.

• Use the voice recorder already on your phone. Nothing else is required.

Equipment is not the part that fails.

• Ask one question, then stop talking. The silence after a question is where

the answer lives. Most people fill it, and get a shorter answer for it.

• Ask about objects and rooms, not about feelings. "What did the kitchen look

like?" gets you further than "were you happy?" — every time.

• Ask the same question again months later. The second answer is rarely the

same as the first, and is usually the truer one.

• Back the files up in two places, today. A phone is not an archive. More of

these recordings are lost to a dead handset than to anything else.

What is genuinely hard about doing it yourself is not the recording. It is keeping it going for a year, and the fact that your presence in the room changes what your parent is willing to say.

Questions

Does she need to be good with phones? If she can send a voice note on Telegram, she is ready. There is nothing to install beyond that, no typing, no forms and no new app to learn.

She speaks Farsi and my own reading is weak. Can I still follow along? Yes. Every story appears on your dashboard as it is captured, and the second edition in English is there for exactly this.

Is the book translated from English? No. If she speaks Farsi, she is listened to in Farsi, the stories are shaped in Farsi, and the book is typeset in Farsi. Nothing passes through English on the way.

What if she does not want to talk about something? She says so, and Sara moves on. She can also correct or change anything she has already said, at any point, and so can you before it prints.

What if she stops halfway? The stories captured so far are yours, on the dashboard, and the refund window is there if the whole thing is not right.

If your mother's stories are in Farsi, they should stay in Farsi. That is the entire idea.