How to interview a parent about their life

The hard part is not the questions. It is that you are their child, they know exactly which subjects you are circling, and you have both spent decades keeping the conversation comfortable. A method helps. This one is built for a phone call, because that is when people talk most honestly — no eye contact, no audience, no tidying the house first.

Before the call

1. Tell them why. "I want to record you telling me about your life, so we have it." Do not dress it up as a project or a gift. The plain reason lands better.
2. Book it. A named time on a named day, forty-five minutes, is far more likely to happen than "sometime soon".
3. Pick one theme for this call — childhood, or work, or how they met. One theme per call is the single biggest quality improvement available to you.
4. Write down six questions. You will use three.
5. Sort out the recording in advance so you are not fumbling while they are talking. See how to record a phone call on iPhone.

The first five minutes

Start with the date and who is on the call — say it out loud, for the recording. Then get consent on tape: "I'm recording this so we keep it, all right?" Then ask something concrete and harmless. Never open with meaning.

• Good opener: "What did the kitchen in the old house look like?"
• Bad opener: "What are you most proud of in your life?"

Concrete detail warms people up. Abstractions make them perform. By minute ten they will be answering the big questions without being asked them.

How to ask

• One question, then stop talking. Count to five in your head after they finish. The second half of the answer is the good half.
• Ask for scenes, not summaries: "walk me through that day" beats "what was that like".
• Follow the flinch. If they change the subject quickly, note it and come back to it in a later call — not in this one.
• Do not correct them. If the year is wrong, let it be wrong. You are recording their version, which is the thing that will be irreplaceable.
• Repeat their last few words back as a question when you get stuck. It restarts them without steering them.

When it gets hard

Someone will cry — quite possibly you. That is not a failure of the interview, it is the reason you are doing it. Do not rush to comfort them out of the moment; wait, then ask if they want to keep going. If they say no, stop immediately and say you will come back to it. Then actually come back to it.

How long, and how often

• Forty-five minutes is the sweet spot. Ninety is too long for anyone over seventy.
• Four or five short calls beat one marathon. People remember more the second time you ask.
• End early rather than late. Leaving them wanting more is how you get a next call.

Afterwards

1. Back the file up somewhere that is not your phone, the same day.
2. Label it: name, date, theme. Untitled files are lost files.
3. Write down the three things you want to ask next time, while they are still fresh.
4. Ask before you share it with the wider family. It was a private conversation.

Ana exists to remove the mechanics from all of this: it runs the call, captures both sides in archival quality, and keeps them in a private archive that stays yours. The questions are still yours to ask — here are fifty of them.