Tell Me About You

About this journal

One day you will want to ask, and you will not be able to.

Most of what we know about our parents is a handful of stories they happen to tell well. Where they were born. How they met. The one about the car.

Everything else goes with them, and it goes quietly. Not because anybody minded being asked, but because nobody got round to asking.

A book you give to someone else

This is not a journal you keep. You write your name in the front, you give it to your mother or your father or your grandmother, and they fill it in and give it back.

There are 112 questions in seven parts, one to a page with a full page to answer on: where they started, growing up, love, work and money, what they believe, the hard years, and what they want you to know.

What is inside

• 112 questions across seven parts, one question per page
• A full page of writing space for every answer, not three lines
• A short page at the start of each part, written to the person answering
• A free page at the end of each part for anything the questions missed
• Four lined pages at the back for a letter
• A page at the front for the giver to say why they chose this person

Who it is for

• A mother or a father, at any age, from a daughter or a son
• Grandparents, whose stories the grandchildren will want and the parents already half know
• Mother's Day, Father's Day, a seventieth, an eightieth, or a Christmas with nothing to buy
• A family where the difficult conversations happen better on paper than at a table
• Anyone who has just realised how much they do not know

Permission on every page

Nobody has to answer everything. Questions can be skipped, crossed out or answered out loud instead, and the book says so more than once so the person holding it does not feel examined.

The questions are plain rather than clever. What did the grown-ups argue about. What were you good at that nobody ever mentioned. Who turned up when it was hard. Those get real answers. Prompts about your greatest life lesson do not.

Questions people ask

Is the writing space big enough for older handwriting? Yes. One question per page with a full page of ruled lines, printed in black on white.

What if they will not do it? Ask one question out loud instead and write the answer down yourself. That counts, and it is often how the book gets started.

Are the questions intrusive? They are direct but never prying, and the book says on several pages that anything can be skipped or crossed out.

Is it only for parents? No. It works for a grandparent, an aunt, a friend of forty years or a partner you thought you knew.

The details

• 6 x 9 inches, 142 pages, matte cover
• Undated, so it can be started at eighty as easily as at fifty
• Printed in colour on white paper, comfortable for older handwriting
• Sturdy enough to be kept and read for a long time

Give it, then leave it alone. When it comes back, read it once all the way through before you say anything about it.

Also from Mara Linde

A Line a Day, a five-year memory journal with two lines a night, and What Is This For, twelve months of the questions people put off.