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Saving your family's stories

Questions to ask, ways to capture memories, and how to turn a conversation into a memoir your whole family can keep.

June 25, 2026

50 Questions to Ask Your Parents About Their Life

A curated list of 50 questions to draw out your parents' real stories — organized by life stage, with interviewer techniques for getting past short answers.

June 24, 2026

How to Record Your Parents' Life Story (Without Them Writing a Word)

A practical, step-by-step method for capturing your parents' or grandparents' life story — including how to choose a recording approach you'll actually finish.

June 23, 2026

StoryWorth Alternatives: An Honest Comparison (2026)

A fair, detailed comparison of the main ways to capture a parent's life story — StoryWorth, voice-prompt apps, ghostwriters, DIY recording, and AI — with the trade-offs of each.

June 22, 2026

Before I built anything, I looked at every other option

Before building my own app, I went through every way to capture a parent's life story — apps, services, gadgets. A founder's honest take on why none of them quite worked.

June 20, 2026

Writing a memoir used to be almost impossible. Then AI did the hard part.

For most of history, leaving a memoir was a luxury — you needed to write, or pay someone who could. Here's the boring-but-huge thing AI just changed.

June 18, 2026

Everyone deserves a record of their life. Even you.

I'm not famous and neither are you. Here's why I think every ordinary person should leave behind a record of who they were, in their own words.

June 16, 2026

If you can talk, you can leave a book about yourself

Leaving a record of your life used to take rare skill or real money. Now it takes one thing almost everyone already has — and there's a reason to do it now, not later.

June 14, 2026

A memoir doesn't need to be good. It needs to be yours.

The quiet fear that stops people from recording their stories — that it has to be polished and complete — gets the whole point of a memoir backwards.

June 12, 2026

What MemoirTalk actually is (and what it isn't)

People reach for the nearest mental box — a chatbot, or a weekly questionnaire. MemoirTalk is neither. Here's the plain version of what it does.

June 10, 2026

The best gift for your parents isn't a thing

Another sweater, another gadget they won't use. After a certain age, the gift our parents actually want has nothing to do with shopping — and we keep getting it wrong.

June 8, 2026

What people miss most as they get older isn't what you'd expect

It isn't their health or their independence they mention first. Again and again, it's something quieter: being listened to. Here's why that matters, and what to do about it.

June 6, 2026

How to make sure the older people in your life have someone to talk to

When you can't be there as often as you'd like, here are practical ways to make sure a parent or grandparent still has real conversation in their days.

June 4, 2026

A record of your life is a kind of insurance

We insure houses, cars, and incomes against things that might happen. A record of who you are insures against something that definitely will — and almost no one buys it.

June 2, 2026

Don't assume you'll always be able to ask

We all plan to capture our parents' stories 'someday.' Someday quietly relies on an assumption none of us should make — that there will always be time.

May 30, 2026

It rarely happens with warning

We picture loss as something slow that gives us time to prepare. Often it doesn't. The case for capturing the people you love while everything is still ordinary.

May 28, 2026

What to do with a parent's old journals, letters, and notes

A drawer of diaries, a shoebox of letters, notes in the margins of books. Here's how to make sense of the paper a parent leaves behind — and capture the stories only they can explain.

May 26, 2026

The conversation that's also a keepsake

Talking with an aging parent does two jobs at once — it gives them company today, and it leaves a record for tomorrow. Most ways of staying close only do the first.

May 23, 2026

One day your kids will want to know who you were

We think about recording our parents' stories. We rarely think about our own. But the same question is coming for you — and you're the only one who can answer it.

May 21, 2026

When someone's gone, this is what the family goes looking for

After a loss, people don't reach for the official record — the documents, the dates, the achievements. They reach for the person's own words. Here's why that should change what we save.