How Do You Interview an Older Relative for Their Life Story?

My grandfather never volunteered a word about the war. For decades the family knew him as moody and difficult, the man who made that sucking noise through his teeth and cooked enormous Christmas dinners. When I was seventeen I sat down next to him after one of those dinners and asked. He looked at me for a moment and said, “It didn’t start with Pearl Harbor for me.”

What came out over the next few Christmas visits became the book Behind the Wire, and it’s the reason I do this work. I’ve written the full story of why I became a ghostwriter elsewhere. This page is the practical half: what those conversations taught me about getting an older relative to tell their story, and what I still do with clients in their nineties.

How do you get an older relative to start talking about their life?

Start where they’re comfortable. My grandfather’s comfortable place was the kitchen, and I found him there before I ever asked about the war. For some people it’s a hobby, a job they loved, the town they grew up in, a photograph on the wall. Ask about that first. The hard material comes later, once they’ve decided you’re really listening.

Then ask one question that’s specific enough to answer. “Tell me about your life” gets a shrug. “What was the first thing you cooked in the Navy?” gets a story. The specific question tells them you want the detail, and older people who’ve been politely ignored for years often light up when someone wants the detail.

A relative who shows up with a clipboard and a deadline gets the short version. Older people can tell fast whether you’re there to listen or to check a box, and I don’t blame them one bit for keeping the good stories away from someone in a hurry.

What questions should you ask a grandparent about their life?

Questions about moments work better than questions about periods. A few that open doors:

• ► What’s the earliest thing you remember clearly?
• ► What did a normal day look like when you were twenty?
• ► Who was the most important person in your life that nobody in the family remembers?
• ► What was the hardest decision you ever made, and would you make it again?
• ► What do you wish someone had asked you years ago?

Follow wherever the answer goes instead of marching through a list. The best material comes from follow-up questions you didn’t plan, the “and then what happened?” after a story you’ve never heard.

Why does an older person’s story come out in pieces?

Because that’s how memory works, and because some of it hurts. My grandfather’s story came in fragments across several visits, sometimes prompted by a question, sometimes surfacing out of a long silence. Details about Shanghai or Manila would arrive in the middle of a sentence about something else.

Don’t try to force it into order during the conversations. Collect the pieces and sort them later. I see the same pattern with clients.

One of mine, telling me about his daughter’s death forty years earlier, needed several sessions before he could get it all out. Another needed four interviews to tell me about abuse he survived as a boy.

How do you handle the painful parts?

Slowly, and with their permission. When someone starts to cry, stop asking questions. Talk about something easy for a few minutes, a recent trip or the weather, and come back when they’re ready. Tell them it’s all right, and mean it. They’ll be embarrassed. Almost everyone is.

Tell them, too, that they don’t have to include anything they don’t want to. It sounds like it would make people hold back. In my experience it does the opposite: the moment people know they have a choice, most of them decide the hard part belongs in the story.

Should you record interviews with an older relative?

Yes, always, with their agreement. A phone on the table is enough. You won’t remember the exact words, and the exact words make a life story sound like the person. I record every client session, by phone, video or tablet.

Save the recordings somewhere safe, with a copy off your phone, and write down the date and a line about what was covered. Years later, those notes are how you find the one story you need.

How do you check what an older relative remembers?

Against anything written at the time: letters, journals, service records, newspaper clippings, photographs with dates on the back.

Family stories drift over decades. For fifty years my family said my grandfather survived the Bataan Death March. His own journal, written after the war, describes a different forced march, into Manila, after Corregidor fell. The journal won.

Don’t doubt your relative, but do look. The written record fills in dates and names that memory drops, and it keeps the family legend from replacing what really happened.

Families get this wrong in both directions. Some keep repeating the legend because correcting it feels disloyal, and some treat every discrepancy as proof the old man made it all up. Both shortchange the person. Memory bends over fifty years, and the story still belongs to them after the dates are fixed.

Should you interview other family members too?

Yes. Siblings, cousins, old friends and former coworkers each remember a different piece of the person. When I’ve written memoirs for people who had already died, the interviews with brothers and sisters were most of what I had. Even when the person is alive, the family remembers things they won’t say about themselves. Just be clear about whose version is whose. A book built mostly on other people’s memories reads differently from one built on the person’s own words, and readers should be able to tell.

I think families underrate this. A grandchild reading the book thirty years from now deserves to know which stories came from Grandma herself and which came from her sister, because a secondhand memory carries a different weight.

Why shouldn’t you wait?

Because the window closes without warning. My conversations with my grandfather happened just in time.

Within a few years, Alzheimer’s was taking the stories, and by the last Christmas I saw him, he was checking the same pot three times in five minutes. He died in 1985. I’ve written about that urgency in Witnesses Are Dying, and it’s the one piece of advice I’d give above all the others.

My oldest memoir clients so far were 92 and 94. The people who start in time get their stories told in their own words. Families who wait end up working from papers and other people’s memories.

What should you do after the interviews?

Transcribe the recordings, or have them transcribed, and sort the stories by period or theme.

Mark the places where you need a date, a name or a second opinion. Then decide what the material wants to be: a family book printed for the grandchildren, a longer memoir, or a published book. My article on finishing a late parent’s memoir from their papers covers what happens when you can’t ask the person anymore.

Whatever form it takes, finish it while your relative can still read it. I hate the thought of a family completing a lovely book a year after the funeral, when the one person who’d have treasured it most never got to hold it.

If you’d like help turning the conversations into a book, my memoir ghostwriting starts with the same patient interviews, and the Book Discovery Intensive gives you a sample chapter before you commit. My ghostwriting services cover the full book.

From the author

Behind the Wire
Behind the Wire is the true story of my grandfather, Frank Hoeffer II, a prisoner of war. I built it from the journal he wrote after the war, with no names changed.

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