You think your life was ordinary. Your grandkids won't.

Almost everyone I talk to who's past 60 says some version of the same thing: "My life wasn't that interesting. Who'd want to read about me?"

I get why it feels that way. You lived it one ordinary day at a time. You went to work, raised the kids, paid the bills, got old. From the inside it looks like nothing much. Just a life.

But you're the wrong person to judge that, and I mean that kindly. You're too close to it. The stuff that feels boring to you — the town that doesn't quite exist the same way anymore, the job nobody does now, what a dollar used to buy, how you and your husband actually met, the year everything changed — none of that is boring to the people who come after you. That's the good stuff. It's the stuff they can't look up.

Here's something I've watched happen more than once. A grandkid, usually late teens or twenties, gets curious. Starts asking about the family — where they come from, who the people in the old photos were, what Grandma was really like. And the answer, so often, is: nobody wrote it down. Grandma's gone, whatever she knew went with her, and now there's a kid holding a photo of a stranger who happens to have their nose.

You can be the grandparent that doesn't happen to. And not by writing some grand memoir — nobody's asking you to become a writer at 70. Just by telling it. Out loud. The way you'd tell it at the kitchen table if somebody finally asked the right question.

That's the thing, honestly. Most people your age were never asked. Nobody ever sat down and said, "Tell me about when you were young." So the stories just sit there, filed under "nothing special," until the day they're finally wanted and it's too late to go get them.

I built MemoirTalk so the asking part takes care of itself. You just talk — about whatever, in whatever order it comes — and it turns what you said into a written life story your family can keep. No typing. No figuring out where to begin. You talk, it remembers.

But set the tool aside for a second. The real point is this: your grandchildren are going to want to know you, probably more than they let on now, and a lot more once you're not around to ask. Don't leave them to piece you together from photographs. You're still here. Tell them while you can.

— Jeff