60 Questions to Ask Your Parents About Their Life Story

Most families mean to record a parent’s story “one day”. The right questions make it easier to start. Below are sixty, grouped by stage of life, with advice on how to ask them and what to do with the answers.

You will not need all of them. Pick five or six per conversation and follow wherever the answers lead. The best material usually comes from the follow-up question: what happened next?

Before you start

Record everything. A phone voice memo is fine. Ask permission first, then put the phone somewhere out of sight so it is quickly forgotten.
Keep sessions short. Forty-five minutes to an hour is plenty. Memory tires, and so do people.
Bring prompts. Old photographs, a school report or a map of the street they grew up on will unlock more than any question.
Let silence work. When an answer stops, wait. People often add the most important detail after a pause.

Childhood

Where were you born, and what was the house like?
What is your earliest memory?
Who lived with you when you were small?
What did your parents do for a living?
What did you have for tea on an ordinary weekday?
What games did you play, and with whom?
Who was your best friend, and what happened to them?
Were you ever in serious trouble? What for?
What were you frightened of?
What smells or sounds remind you of being a child?

School and growing up

What was your first school like?
Which teacher do you still remember, and why?
What were you good at, and what did you hate?
What did you want to be when you grew up?
When did you leave school, and what did you do next?
What music did you love as a teenager?
Where did young people go to have fun?
What did your parents not know about you?
What were you proudest of at sixteen?
What did the adults around you worry about?

Work

What was your first job, and what did it pay?
How did you find it?
Who taught you the most at work?
What was the hardest job you ever did?
Were you ever sacked, or did you ever walk out?
What are you proudest of from your working life?
What would you do differently?
How did work change over your lifetime?
Did you ever start something of your own?
When did you stop working, and how did it feel?

Love and family

How did you meet your partner?
What was your first impression of them?
What was your wedding day like?
Where was your first home together?
What was the day your first child was born like?
What surprised you about being a parent?
What did you argue about as a family?
What family traditions did you start, or keep?
Who in the family were you closest to?
What do you wish you had said to your own parents?

Big moments

Where were you when you heard major news, such as a moon landing, a royal event, or a war?
Did you ever move country or city? Why?
What was the hardest year of your life?
What got you through it?
What was the luckiest thing that ever happened to you?
Did you ever have a narrow escape?
What is the bravest thing you have done?
Who changed the course of your life?
What did you lose that you still think about?
What did you find later in life that you wish you had found sooner?

Looking back

What do you believe now that you did not believe at twenty?
What are you most grateful for?
What advice would you give your younger self?
What do you hope your grandchildren know about you?
What should people stop worrying about?
What makes a good life?
What is something nobody in the family knows?
Which possession means the most to you, and why?
How would you like to be remembered?
Is there anything I have not asked that I should have?

Asking the difficult questions

Some questions touch grief, regret or family secrets. Ask them gently, and never in the first session. Make it clear that anything can be left out of the final version. Many people find it easier to talk about painful things once they know they keep control over what is written down.

Turning answers into a book

Recordings alone are precious, but few relatives will listen to twenty hours of audio. A short family memoir of 30,000 to 50,000 words, with photographs, is something people actually read and pass on.

You can transcribe and shape the material yourself, or ask a memoir ghostwriter to interview your parent and write the book in their voice. Either way, start soon. The stories that matter most are often the ones nobody thought to ask about.