Ask someone what it was like growing up and you will get four words back. Ask what the kitchen smelled like on a Monday and you will be there for an hour.
This is the most useful thing we have learned from building reminiscence books: the general question closes a door and the specific question opens one. Nobody can answer “tell me about your childhood.” Everybody can answer “who sat where at the table?”
Why the big question fails
A large question asks someone to summarise fifty years while you watch. That is work, and it is the kind of work that makes people say “oh, nothing much, we just got on with it.”
A small question asks them to remember one thing. Memory does not store summaries; it stores the smell of a particular hallway. Start at the hallway and the summary arrives on its own, ten minutes later, without anybody having to construct it.
Twelve that work
- What was the first job you were paid for, and what did you do with the money?
- Who sat where at the dinner table?
- What was on the radio or the television in the background?
- What did your mother worry about?
- Which shop did you get sent to, and what did they sell?
- What did you wear to school, and what was wrong with it?
- Who was the neighbour everybody knew?
- What was the first car in the family, and who was allowed to drive it?
- What did Sunday look like, hour by hour?
- Which song do you associate with being seventeen?
- What did you save up for, and how long did it take?
- What is something you can do that almost nobody can do any more?
How to ask
Ask one. Then stop talking. The silence after a question is where the answer forms, and most of us fill it far too quickly with a second question, which lets the other person off the hook.
Do not record it on your phone unless they have said yes. The red dot changes how people speak. A pen and a page changes it far less, and the handwriting turns out to matter more than anyone expects, later.
Ask in the afternoon rather than at a gathering. Memory needs quiet and no audience.
What to do with the answers
Write them down while they are fresh, in their words rather than yours. If you would rather not manage that from scratch, our memory books are built on exactly this principle — one specific question to a page, in large print, with room to write the answer beside it.
But the book is not the point. The afternoon is the point.