# How it works: from a conversation to a finished book

Most memoir products send a question a week by email and bind the answers. That is a scrapbook, not a book. Here is what a book takes, and how this does it.

## 1. A visit, not a form

The person tells their story by voice, in visits of fifteen to twenty minutes, in the app on their phone or a tablet. A text message reminds them when a visit is waiting. Phone-call visits at a set time, on any phone, are available as a premium add-on. Nobody types. Nobody logs in. The invitation from their family is the login.

The interviewer (named Wren in the app) asks one question, listens to the whole answer, and asks the next question a good listener would: "Who else was there?" "What did she say, exactly?" "What happened the day after?" Six to eight questions a visit. Two or three visits a week is the ceiling for most people at eighty.

## 2. It remembers everything

Every answer goes into one record: the people, the places, the years, the sayings, the stories with their beginnings and ends. Wren knows which stories stop halfway, which people are still faint, which years nobody has spoken about. The next question comes from that, not from a list.

Between visits there is one small daily card: a thirty-second question by voice ("What did your father keep in his pockets?"). Cards harvest the texture a book needs and keep the thread warm.

## 3. The book is designed before it is written

When the record holds what a writer needs (every central person whole, every turning point told start to end), the book is designed: its shape, its chapters, where it starts. Only then is anything drafted. Memoir mode writes only what was said, in the person's own voice, with hearsay marked as hearsay. Novel mode builds a story around the true facts and lists, at the back, exactly what was invented.

The family reads a proof. Anything sealed by the teller stays sealed. Anything the teller wants left out is left out.

## 4. You own it

Every recording, every transcript and the book itself belong to the person who told it. Export everything, free, at any time, as audio, text and PDF. There is no subscription that locks your stories away when it lapses, because there is no subscription.