National Senior Citizens Day falls on 21 August. It was established in the 1980s and it’s one of those observances that passes largely unmarked, which is a shame given what it points at.
I write other people’s life stories for a living. A great many of the people I’ve interviewed have been well past retirement, and I’ve had the same conversation with almost all of them.
They tell me they’re not sure there’s a book in it. They say their life was ordinary. They apologize for taking up my time with something they suspect isn’t worth the effort.
They’ve been wrong every single time.
Why People Undervalue Their Own Lives
The reason is structural and it applies to everybody, including you.
You experienced your life from the inside, in order, at normal speed. Nothing about it surprised you, because you were there for the setup to every development. The extraordinary parts arrived gradually enough to feel like Tuesday.
Somebody hearing it for the first time gets it compressed, out of order, and without the years of context that made it feel inevitable to you. They’re astonished by things you have long since stopped noticing.
This is why people are terrible judges of their own material. It’s not modesty. It’s that familiarity has stripped the interest out of it for the one person who cannot get it back.
What Older People Have
Three things that are difficult to get any other way.
They’ve seen a whole arc. They know how things turned out, which nobody in the middle of a career does. Somebody who watched an industry change completely over forty years can tell you which of the confident predictions were nonsense, because they were there for both ends.
They have specifics. Not opinions about the period, which anybody can read, but the texture. What the office smelled like. What a thing cost. What people were afraid of that turned out not to matter.
And they have usually stopped performing. A person still building a career manages their story. Somebody at eighty is generally past that, and what you get instead is candor, including about their own mistakes, which is the material nobody under fifty will give you.
The Interview That Works
If you want to capture somebody’s story, don’t ask them to tell you their life. That question produces a summary and summaries are worthless.
Ask about one day. Ask about a specific object. Ask what they were doing when some public event happened, or how they met somebody, or what the first job paid.
Small doors open large rooms. A question about a car produces a story about a road trip which produces the reason they moved which produces the whole decision that shaped forty years. A question about their life produces “well, I was born in…”
Record it. Your phone is enough. The single commonest regret I encounter is from somebody who meant to sit down properly one day with better equipment and a clear afternoon, and the afternoon never came.
The Part I Do Not Soften
I wrote my grandfather’s memoir from journals he wrote after the war. He was gone by the time I did it, and I worked from what he’d left behind.
It changed how I understood him completely. The family had known him as gruff and standoffish. Reading what he’d survived made the gruffness legible as something else entirely, and I only got that because he’d written it down.
He wrote it from memory, years afterward, without notes, because the camps hadn’t permitted diaries. He could have told nobody and taken all of it with him. A great many men in his position did exactly that.
Everything I know about him past the surface exists because one man decided the record should exist. That’s the whole argument for this day and I have never found a better one.
What to Do With 21 August
Call somebody. That’s the entire recommendation and it takes twenty minutes.
Ask one question and let them go wherever they go with it. Don’t steer, don’t correct dates, and don’t tell them your version of the story they’re telling. Record it if you can and take notes if you cannot.
You’ll get something you didn’t have. And if you do it a few more times over the following year, you’ll have the beginnings of a record that nobody else on earth is keeping.
Nobody is coming to do this. There’s no archive collecting your family. What survives is what somebody in it decided to keep.