How to interview a grandparent (questions that actually work)

'Tell me about your life' is the worst question you can ask. It's too big. People freeze, summarise, and give you the version they think is expected: born here, worked there, married so-and-so. The dates survive, and everything human about the story gets left out.

Good interviewing is about small doors, not big ones. Ask about the kitchen of their childhood home and what it smelled like. Ask what they got in trouble for at school. Ask about the best meal they ever ate, their first day of work, the neighbour everyone talked about. Specific questions unlock specific memories — and specific memories carry the emotion, humour, and detail that make a recorded life actually feel like the person.

Some questions that reliably work: What did your parents argue about? What's a smell that takes you straight back to childhood? Who was your best friend when you were ten, and what happened to them? What's a piece of advice you didn't take and wish you had? What did people get wrong about you? What was the hardest year of your life, and how did you get through it?

Record the audio if you possibly can. The way someone tells a story — the pauses, the laugh before the punchline they've delivered a hundred times, the accent that softened over decades — is half of what you're preserving. A transcript keeps the facts; a recording keeps the person.

Keep sessions short. Forty-five minutes is plenty; memory work is genuinely tiring, especially for older people. Come back another day — you'll find the first session has stirred things up, and the second one is almost always richer. End every session with the same question: 'What should I have asked you that I didn't?' The answers to that one are frequently the best material you'll get.

Finally: don't wait for the perfect setup. A phone on the kitchen table beats a studio session that never happens. The recordings families treasure most are almost never polished — they're the ones that exist.