The Questions You Will Wish You Had Asked Your Parents

Think about what you actually know about your mother before she was your mother. For most people it comes down to five or six stories. The one about the dance hall. The flat with the damp wall. The time she hitchhiked somewhere she was not supposed to go.

Those stories survive because she tells them well. Everything she does not tell well, or does not think is interesting, is still in her head, and it will not be forever.

Why nobody asks

It is not that we do not care. It is that asking feels strange. You cannot suddenly say over the roast potatoes, tell me about the hardest year of your life. It sounds like a documentary, or worse, like you know something about their health that they do not.

So we wait for a better moment, and the better moment is very often a hospital corridor or the car on the way back from a funeral.

The better moment is very often a hospital corridor. Ask while it is still just an ordinary Sunday.

Ask small before you ask big

The questions that open people up are rarely the grand ones. Nobody answers what was the meaning of your life. Almost everybody will tell you what was on the table at Christmas when they were eight, and halfway through that answer they will tell you who was missing from the table and why.

A good order goes roughly like this:

• Where they started: the house, the street, the smell of the kitchen, the first school.
• The people: parents, brothers and sisters, the friend they lost touch with.
• Work and money: the first wage, what it bought, the job they wanted and did not get.
• Love: how they met, and the person before that, if they will say.
• What they believed, and what changed their mind.
• The hard years, only once the rest has been told, and only if they want to.
• What they would like you to know that you have not asked.

Give permission to skip

The single most useful sentence you can say is: you can leave any of these out. Some questions will land on something your parent has carried alone for fifty years, and they are allowed to keep carrying it.

In my experience, the permission is what makes people answer. A father who would refuse a question if it were demanded will often come back to it three weeks later, in writing, on his own terms.

Why in their handwriting

You can record a conversation on your phone and you should, if they agree. But there is a reason to also hand them a book and a pen and let them take their time.

People write things they would never say out loud across a table. They get to think, cross out and start again. And their handwriting is part of what you are keeping. My grandmother's shopping lists are among the things I would save from a fire, and they only say butter and stamps.

How to actually give it to them

• Give it on an ordinary day, not a birthday. A present on a birthday feels like a present. On a Tuesday it feels like interest.
• Say plainly why: I realised I only know four stories about your life, and I would like to know the rest.
• Tell them there is no deadline and no order. Page forty before page two is fine.
• Do not ask how it is going every week. Ask once a month, lightly.
• When they give it back, read it, and then tell them one thing in it that surprised you.

The book

Tell Me About You is a book you give away. It holds 112 questions in seven parts, in roughly the order above, one question to a page with room to write. Every page gives permission to leave things out. They fill it in, in their own hand, and give it back to you.