A Book of Questions to Ask the People Whose Stories You Want to Hear
The book is out. Here's who it's for.
I have a book in my hands. Hey [Loved One], I have a question for you. It just got printed this week and I’ve been opening it at random.
It’s a book of questions, around two hundred of them, and it’s designed to be something you can use to collect stories and details about someone’s life. You can use it to learn more about your parent, or a grandparent, or an aunt or a friend or a mentor, or anyone whose life you’d like to understand more of. You can do it for yourself too.
I put it together because I wanted to offer another way to get people started on the path to writing their personal stories or memoirs in addition to working with me. Most of what we know about the people we love hasn’t been written down or recorded. All of it goes when they go, unless somebody writes it down.
I made the book in part because of a small thing my grandparents did when I was in middle school. They sat down one afternoon and filled a few pages of a spiral notebook with stories they wanted me to have, like what it was like to grow up where they grew up, what they had to go through, and what they remembered. A few handwritten pages. Maybe you’d want to know how these old farts did things back in the old days, my grandfather said.
Hey [Loved One] is what I wish I’d had at the time — questions to ask them and a place to put it all. The questions themselves are useful, but the real value is just having something in front of you when you sit down with somebody that lets the person you're with know it's okay to take their time.
There’s a section near the end of the book where the person you’re talking to is invited to ask questions back, because the whole point is to have a conversation.
Who it’s for
The book is intended to work for pretty much anybody. If you might want to learn more about someone’s life, the book is available now.
I’d love help getting this book into the hands of the people who can actually use it. The folks I have in mind:
Anyone with a parent or grandparent whose stories haven’t quite been gotten down. Retirees thinking about what gets left behind, or just looking for a way back into their own life. Estate planners and attorneys who deal in wills and trusts and the legal side of legacy but who know there’s a non-legal side to all this that mostly doesn’t get addressed. Hospice workers, social workers, and anybody whose work puts them near people who still have things to say. Or even anyone who’s done a personality test or a journaling app and wished it had gone into writing they could shape into a book.
If you know somebody in any of those camps, send them a link. Or send them the book.
And of course
When you go through a book like this, or you sit down to write your own, you are likely to end up with more material than you know what to do with. Life stories get collected into notebooks, recordings, and scraps here and there.
Well, there’s definitely a book in there somewhere but it can be hard to see what it wants to look like. I’m the kind of person who loves doing that kind of work. I help people turn the stories they’re carrying into books, whether for themselves or for someone they love. There’s a page about it at stephenlloydwebber.com/yourstory.
But mostly, this is just to say: the book is out. Let’s all have conversations, connect in person, and be good to each other.