80 questions to ask your parents

There’s a particular difficulty with your own parents that doesn’t apply to a grandparent or a great-aunt. You’ve heard the stories already — or you’ve heard the version told at the table, which has been polished over forty years until it’s a well-timed anecdote rather than a memory. For a grandparent or a great-aunt, where the stories are less worn, the broader questions to ask your grandparents list is the better place to start.

And there’s more at stake. A grandparent’s difficult year is history. A parent’s difficult year probably happened to you too, and asking about it means opening something you both stepped around.

So the useful questions here aren’t the ones on a standard list. They’re the ones that get behind the anecdote. The same is true of a printed memory book for grandparents — those prompts are written to fill a page, not to get behind a story.

Getting past the version you’ve already heard

The trick is to ask about the parts of a familiar story nobody ever narrates: what happened just before, what it cost, who else was there, and what they thought at the time rather than what they concluded later.

Them as a person, before they were your parent

Most people find this the most surprising section, because the honest answer is that you probably don’t know very much about who your parents were at twenty-two. You met them when they were already someone’s mother or father.

Work and money

This section reliably produces detail people have never mentioned, partly because nobody ever asks, and partly because a generation raised not to discuss money will answer specific questions about it quite readily.

Marriage and family, honestly

These are the ones to ask once the earlier sections have gone well, and only if the relationship can carry them. Read the room. Several of these produce long silences, and the silence is usually them deciding whether to give you the real answer — so don’t fill it.

The family record

Practical, and the section most likely to be genuinely irrecoverable if you leave it. Once the person who knows is gone, nobody can reconstruct which cousin is in the photograph.

The ones worth asking while you can

What to do with what you get

The failure mode is always the same and it isn’t the asking. It’s that the answers end up in a notes app, a voice memo nobody plays back, and your own memory — and six months later there’s no record the conversation happened at all. How to record your parents’ life story covers the practical half of this — what to record on, and when to write it up.

Write it up the same day if you’re writing it up. Detail evaporates faster than anyone expects, and what survives a week is your summary, not their words — and their words are the entire point.

StoryPrompt is the version that doesn’t rely on anyone keeping it up. We email one question a week, they write back in their own words, and every answer collects into a typeset book you can download any time, during the paid year and after it. £25 once, for a year of prompts. Answers are written rather than spoken, and the book is a PDF you own rather than a hardback we post.