# 21 questions to ask your parents about journeys and places

Every journey is a scene with a beginning and an end. These questions ask for the first one taken alone, the one taken because there was no choice, and the place they never went back to. Record it. Not notes: a recording. The sound of the voice is the part you will want in twenty years.

1. Is there a place you still think of as home, even if you can never go back?
2. What was the journey itself like? How long, what did it smell like, who was sick, who was kind?
3. What was the first journey you took on your own? How old were you, and who was waiting at the other end?
   The first solo journey is the first chapter of adulthood.
4. What was the farthest you had been from home by the time you were twenty?
   The size of the world at twenty is the measure of everything after.
5. Tell me about a family holiday that went wrong. Who was to blame?
   The holiday disaster is the most-retold story in any family; get the definitive version.
6. When did you first see the sea, and who took you?
7. What did you pack for a journey, and what did you always forget?
8. What was the first car the family had, and where did it take you?
   The first car redraws the family's whole map.
9. Is there a place you went once and have thought about ever since?
   The place they never went back to is usually hiding a want.
10. Who did you meet on a journey that you still remember by name?
   A stranger remembered by name for fifty years has earned a paragraph.
11. What was your first flight like? Where were you going, and what did you wear for it?
12. Where did you spend your honeymoon, and what did it cost?
13. What did you send home from a trip: a postcard, a present, a photograph? Who kept it?
14. Is there a place you always meant to go and never did? What stopped you?
15. What was the longest you were ever away from home, and what had changed when you got back?
16. What wild creature did you see that you have never forgotten? Where were you?
17. What did you drive, or ride, or wait for at the bus stop in the 1960s?
18. Where did you go on holiday in the 1970s, and how did you get there?
19. What did you drive in the 1970s, what colour was it, and what kept going wrong with it?
   A car that kept breaking down is a running joke the book can use.
20. Which holiday did you spend away from the family, and where were you?
21. Which journey did you take because you had to, not because you wanted to? (tender: ask once, late, in person)

## How to use these questions

Ask by voice, not by form. Record it. One or two questions a visit is enough; the follow-up ("who else was there?", "what did she say?", "what happened the day after?") matters more than the next question on the list. Tender questions are marked; ask them once, late, and with "or would you rather leave that?" in the question itself.

## About Tellforth

Tellforth asks questions like these by voice, remembers every answer, asks the next question a good listener would, and writes a finished book from what was said: a memoir in the person's own words, or a novel built on the true story. You own every recording. https://tellforth.com