A milestone birthday of your own
Turning fifty, sixty or seventy: write the book you keep meaning to
A big birthday makes people take stock, and taking stock usually produces a notebook with three pages in it. The problem was never the material; it was the typing. This is a gift to yourself that does the asking by voice, so the book gets talked into existence over a few months instead of written over a few decades.
What you give
A listener, a message from you, and in time a book.
You can skip the voice message, or record one to yourself. Some people do; it sets out what they want the book to be before the first question.
Visits by voice, fifteen to twenty minutes, when you have them. The interviewer starts where you say and follows the stories with energy in them. It remembers what you have skipped and comes back to it.
A memoir that forms as you go, in your words, with every recording yours. Or, if you would rather, a novel built on the true facts, with the inventions listed at the back.
How to give it
4 steps. You do the first one.
Buy it once, for yourself. One payment, no subscription.
Record a short note to yourself about why now. It is the first page of the book whether or not it appears in it.
"I'm sixty next month. I want the Bristol years down properly, and I want the kids to have the version of their grandfather I actually knew."
Pick a first question that has a story behind it, not a summary. "The night the boat sank" beats "my twenties".
Invite one person to read along if you want a reader. A sibling or an old friend who sends back "you've missed the bit where" is worth a great deal.
Questions to start with
Ask one. Then follow it.
Written for the person telling the story. The full list is at questions to ask yourself about your own life.
- What is the one question your life has been an answer to?
- Which year would you give a whole chapter, and what happened in it?
- Who shaped you most who is not family?
- What did you do that you would not have the nerve to do now?
- What did you get wrong for a long time, and what changed your mind?
- What did your parents never know about you?
- What place do you still dream about, and why that one?
- What do you know at this birthday that you did not know at the last big one?
If they are not sure
It is theirs to accept, or leave.
The hesitation here is usually "who would want to read it". The honest answer is: your children, in about twenty years, and you, in about two. Start with one visit and one story. If it turns out you do not want a memoir, the recordings are still yours, and a single afternoon of telling is worth more than most notebooks.
Tellforth
Tell it forward.
The stories are already there. All that is missing is someone to ask.
Updated · Plain-text version of this page: /occasions/your-own-milestone.md