How to record your parent's life story

There are five honest ways to do this and one of them is free. Which one is right depends on your parent, not on your budget — and the choice that ruins most attempts is not picking the wrong one. It is waiting until the right one is obvious.

Before you choose anything

Open the voice recorder on your phone the next time you speak to them and ask one question. "What did your kitchen look like when you were ten?" Record the answer. It will take four minutes.

Do that before you read the rest of this page. Every option below is an improvement on a recording that exists, and none of them is an improvement on a recording that does not.

The five ways

Do it yourself. Free. A phone, a list of questions, and the discipline to keep going for a year. Produces recordings; producing a book from them is a second project most people never start.

A question-a-week subscription. StoryWorth is the best known: it emails a prompt every week, your parent writes back, and a year of answers is printed as a hardcover. Around $59 to $199 a year depending on plan, as listed in September 2026 — check the current page, these move. It is a writing product. If your parent does not enjoy writing, the weekly email becomes a weekly reproach.

A ghostwriter or personal historian. A human interviews your parent, often over months, and writes the book. The best results in this list come from here. Published rates run from the low thousands into the tens of thousands, and the range is wide because the work genuinely varies.

A videographer. A filmed interview, usually a day, edited into something watchable. The only option that keeps their face and their hands. It captures one sitting rather than a life, which is a different thing and sometimes the better one.

An AI interviewer. A companion asks the questions, across weeks, and the answers become a book. What we build. Cheaper than a person and more patient than a subscription, and it is a machine — which for some families is the reason to choose it and for others the reason not to.

The questions that actually decide it

Do they write, or do they talk? This decides more than price does. A parent who writes letters will enjoy a weekly prompt. A parent who tells stories out loud and has never written anything longer than a text message will not, and no amount of paying for it changes that.

What language do they think in? Most of these options work in English only. If your mother's inner life is in another language, an English-only service does not capture a translated version of her story — it captures a smaller one. We wrote a whole page about what that costs and what to do about it.

How far away are you? Everything that needs you in the room — the videographer, doing it yourself properly — gets harder with a time zone between you, and most families discover this after buying.

Do you want a book, or the voice? They are not the same keepsake. A book gets read at a table by people who never met them. A recording is the thing that undoes you eleven years later. If you can only have one, take the recording; it is also the cheapest.

How much time is there? If the honest answer is "I don't know", that is not a reason to research harder. It is a reason to do the four-minute voice note today and choose properly afterwards.

What we would actually tell you

If your parent writes comfortably in English and would enjoy a weekly question, buy a subscription. It is cheap, it works, and it is not us.

If the story is a significant one and money is not the constraint, hire a human. A good personal historian will get things out of your father that no product in this list will.

If they talk rather than write, or they speak a language these services do not, or you are eight thousand kilometres away and the visits are short — that is the gap we were built for. What it costs is on one page, and there is a thirty-day refund because we would rather you found out early.

And if you do nothing else: the voice note. Today.

Four mistakes, in the order people make them

Waiting for a good time. There is a version of this conversation that feels natural and you will not get it. Start clumsily.

Asking about feelings. "Were you happy?" gets you a yes. "What did the room smell like?" gets you the story. Ask about objects, rooms, journeys, food and money, and the feelings arrive on their own.

One long interview instead of many short ones. Three hours produces a tired parent and a performance. Twenty minutes, repeatedly, across a year, produces a life — which is why the subscription model and ours both work in small pieces.

Not backing anything up. More of these recordings are lost to a dead phone than to anything else. Two places, today, before the next one.