# How to write a book about your mother

This is the most common book people want to make and the one they most often leave too late. If she is alive, the method is interview first and write second. If she is not, it is a different book, and there is a section for that below.

## If she is alive: ask her, by voice, now

Start with her mother. The way a woman describes her own mother tells you how she sees everything. Then the house, the rules, the trouble, the first job, the day she met your father. Leave the hard years for the fifth or sixth conversation.

Record it. The recordings are the thing you will want most in twenty years, and the book is written from them.

## What the book needs about her

Two sayings in her exact words. What she called you, and what she called you when she was angry. One story she always tells, told to the end. Her kitchen. What she was proud of that nobody noticed. What she wanted at nineteen. One thing she did that was completely out of character. If you have those, you have a person on the page.

## If she has died: write from what you have

Gather what remains: letters, recipes, photos, the stories her siblings and friends tell. Interview them with the same questions you would have asked her. Mark everything by where it came from. The honest book about a mother who has died is a book about trying to know her, and that is a good book.

## Make it hers

If she can, let her hear every chapter before anyone else. Her corrections are the most valuable edits you will get. The finished book should carry a line that says it was told by her, in her words, with the family's additions marked.