How to write a memoir about your mother or father
A memoir about a parent is mostly an interviewing problem. The writing is real work, but it comes second: you cannot write what you were never told, and the person who could tell you has a finite amount of time and patience for being asked. Most of the difficulty is in the asking. Almost all of the regret is about starting late.
The window is shorter than it feels
The arithmetic is uncomfortable. If your mother is 75 and you talk properly a few times a year, there are fewer real conversations left than you assume, and the good ones need her to be well, unhurried and in the mood.
Memory does not fail all at once either. Names go first, then the stories get shorter, and it is gradual enough that nobody notices until a question that used to produce a story produces a shrug.
So start badly rather than starting well. One recorded hour this month beats a carefully designed project you begin next year. The first session will be awkward and you will ask weak questions; do it anyway, because the material is what matters and technique improves on its own.
It also pays to be redundant. Ask for the same story twice, a year apart. The second telling always contains something the first one did not.
The questions that actually open people up
Tell me about your childhood produces nothing. It is too large to answer, so people fall back on the summary they have given a hundred times: it was hard, we had nothing, we were happy.
Small and sensory works instead. What did the kitchen smell like on a Sunday. What did you sit on. How did you get to school and how long did it take. What did a loaf of bread cost, and what did your father earn. What was the first thing you bought with your own money.
Objects, routes, money, food, and other people. Those five categories produce more than any question about feelings, because they have concrete answers, and a concrete answer nearly always drags a story out behind it.
Then the move that matters most: say nothing. When they stop, wait five seconds before asking the next thing. Most of the best material in any interview arrives in the silence after somebody thinks they have finished answering.
Record it, and take notes anyway
Use the voice memo app on your phone, on the table where you can both see it, and say out loud that you are recording. Hiding it never ends well, and a visible phone stops being noticeable within about two minutes.
Keep sessions to roughly 45 minutes. Longer and you both get tired, the answers shorten, and you end up with hours of audio you never listen to again. Short and frequent beats one heroic afternoon.
The recording is not only a transcription aid, it is the artifact. In fifteen years the sound of your father’s laugh will matter more than the anecdote he was telling. Back the files up in two places the same day and put dates in the filenames.
Take rough notes at the same time regardless, mostly timestamps and things to come back to. Writing while listening also gives you somewhere to look, which makes the silences easier for both of you.
Photographs are the best prompt you have
A parent with nothing to say in the abstract will talk for an hour with ten prints on the table. Photos remove the burden of choosing what to talk about, which is the part people find hard.
Go one at a time and ask the same four things. Who is that. Who took the picture. What is just outside the frame. What happened right before or right after.
The last two are the productive ones. A photo is a crop of a real afternoon, and the parts that got cropped out are exactly the parts nobody ever wrote down.
Follow the tangents. If a picture of a caravan turns into twenty minutes about a neighbour who appears in no photograph at all, that is not a derailment, that is the session working. You can come back to the photo, or not.
When they resist
There are three common refusals and they are separate problems. Some parents think their life was ordinary and not worth recording. Some dislike the formality of being interviewed. Some will talk about anything except one specific thing.
For the first, drop the words memoir and interview entirely. Ask for help with a concrete task instead: I am trying to label these photos and I do not know who half these people are. That is a request for expertise rather than a request to be a subject, and it gets a different answer.
For the second, remove the sit-down. Ask in the car, or while cooking, or on a walk. Side by side rather than face to face lowers the temperature a great deal, and a phone records perfectly well from a pocket once you have said that it is on.
For the third, take the no. Say you will leave it out, and mean it. A parent who trusts that one subject is genuinely closed will usually open several others, and the closed one sometimes opens by itself two years later.
Difficult material, handled honestly
Every family has material a nice book would smooth over: drinking, a departure, money, an illness nobody named out loud, a person who is no longer spoken to. Sanding it flat produces a book the family does not believe, and the disbelief spreads to the true parts as well.
A rule that holds up: report, do not diagnose. Write what happened, what was said, and what you saw. Do not write that your father was depressed unless somebody diagnosed him. Write that he did not leave the house for most of that winter, which is both truer and harder to read past.
Living people get a say, and asking before you write is far easier than arguing after. If somebody objects to appearing in a chapter, you can usually keep the events and drop the name.
Consider making two versions: a full one for you and your siblings, and a shorter one that goes to everybody else. That is not cowardice, it is an audience decision, and it lets you write the honest one without negotiating every paragraph.
Turning the recordings into a book
Structure comes out of the material, and only two structures reliably work. By era, which any reader can follow. Or by theme, which reads better but requires you to know the whole story before you start. Choose era for a first book.
Keep their actual words. Transcribe the good passages verbatim, dialect and digressions included, and set them as quotes rather than rewriting them in your own voice; the specific way a person says a thing is most of what you are preserving. Your job around those quotes is context: dates, places, who everyone is. Resist over-polishing, because a memoir that reads like literature usually means the parent has been edited out of it.
For the assembly itself, Yujee takes the photos and the story you type in, groups them into chapters, drafts the chapter text and captions, and lays out the pages, which you then correct by chatting with it. What you download is a 300 DPI print-ready PDF, and you take that to a print shop yourself if you want it bound, since it does not print or ship anything. there is no subscription, new accounts get 20 free credits at one credit per photo, your original photos never leave the browser, the interface is available in five languages, and the book text it drafts is English or Chinese.
However you assemble it, print more than one copy. The version that survives a family is the one that exists in several houses.