Questions to ask your parents

There are a dozen lists of a hundred questions and you have probably already found one. Print it, sit down opposite your mother, and work through it, and what you will get is an interview. Polite, complete, and containing almost none of what you wanted.

The list is not the problem. A list is a plan for the person asking. What decides whether anyone opens up is how the question is shaped, and five things shape it.

Five things that change the answer

Ask about objects and rooms, not feelings. "Were you happy as a child?" gets a yes. "What was on the kitchen table?" gets you the oilcloth, the radio that was always on, who sat where and who did not sit down at all. The feelings arrive attached to the furniture. They do not arrive when sent for.

Ask for one instance, not a summary. "What was school like?" invites a paragraph they have said before. "Tell me about one Friday at that school" has no prepared answer, so they have to go and look.

Ask, then stop talking. The silence after a question is where the answer is. Most people cannot bear four seconds of it and fill it with a second, easier question — and get the easier answer. Count to ten in your head. It feels rude. It is the single highest-return thing on this page.

Ask the same question again, months later. The second answer is rarely the same and is usually the truer one. The first time, they tell you the version they tell people. The second time, they have already told you that, so they go further.

Ask them to teach you something. People who go quiet when asked about themselves become fluent when asked how to do the thing they are good at. Get them explaining how to judge the dough, or fix the carburettor, or deal with a difficult uncle, and the stories come in sideways, which is how the good ones usually arrive.

Twenty worth asking

Not a hundred. These are grouped by what they tend to unlock rather than by topic, and the note matters more than the question.

Places, which are the easiest way in

What did you see from your bedroom window?
Who lived next door, and what did your family think of them?
Where did you go when you wanted to not be at home?
What did the street sound like at night?

Money and work, which people answer more honestly than you expect

What was the first thing you bought with your own money?
When were you most worried about money, and what did you do?
What job did you think you were going to have?
Who taught you to work?

Other people, which is where they stop performing

Who was the funniest person in your family?
Who did everyone get wrong?
Which of your friends would I have liked?
Was there someone your parents did not want you to see?

Love, if you have the standing to ask

Who was before my father or my mother?
What did you think marriage was going to be?
When did you know?

The things they carry

What is the bravest thing you ever saw someone do?
What did you not tell your parents?
Is there something you would do differently?
What do you think about when you cannot sleep?

The last one is the best question on this page, and it only works after an hour of the others.

If your parent left a country

These are the questions nobody's list has, and for a family that emigrated they are usually the whole book.

What did you think you were coming back to?
What did you bring that turned out to be useless?
What could you not bring?
What do you cook that nobody here has eaten?
Who did you leave that you never saw again?
What can your grandchildren not say, that you wish they could?

And the practical one underneath all of them: ask in the language they lived it in. A parent answering in their second language gives you a shorter, flatter account, and it is not about fluency — it happens to people who have run companies in English for forty years. There is a whole page about what that costs.

If you are far away

Most of this advice assumes a kitchen table. If what you have is a phone call every Sunday, the method changes shape rather than failing.

One question per call. Not five. The call is still a call.
Voice notes beat scheduled interviews. Nobody prepares for a voice note, so

nobody performs.

Do not send the questions in advance to someone who will write notes. You

will get an essay instead of a memory. Do send them ahead to someone who gets anxious, because anxiety costs you more than preparation does.

Record from the first call, not from the one where they finally say

something important. You cannot go back for the earlier ones.

The question you may not get to ask

There is usually one. Most people wait for a moment that feels appropriate, and the appropriate moment is a thing that arrives in films.

Two honest things about it. You are allowed not to ask — a memoir with a hole in it is still a memoir, and some things are theirs to keep. And if you do ask, ask it as a question about a person rather than an event: not "what happened in that year", but "what was he like, before". People who cannot talk about a thing can almost always talk about someone.

Then back it up

Two places, today. More of these recordings are lost to a dead phone than to anything else, and the loss is total and quiet.

If you would rather not run this yourself — the discipline over a year is the part that defeats most people, not the questions — here are the five ways to have it done, including the free one.