Everyday life

What an ordinary day actually looks like. The first thing to vanish.

6 questions. There is no order you have to follow.

• Tell me about a typical day in your life right now — from morning to evening.
• What do you do when you have an hour free just for yourself?
• What brings you small joy in everyday life?
• What is your view on technology in our lives? What do you like and what bothers you?
• How do you feel about aging? What surprises you about it?
• What are you most grateful for in your life right now?

Using these

Nobody thinks their Tuesday is worth recording, which is exactly why it goes unrecorded. Ask these in the present tense, about this week, not about life in general.

Asking about someone, rather than asking them

If the person is not here to answer, the same question has to change shape. “Where did you grow up?” is a cruel thing to ask about someone who has died, so each question also has a second wording, for asking someone who knew them.

• Describe a typical day in their life — from morning to evening.
• What did they do when they had an hour free just for themselves?
• What brought them small joy in everyday life?
• What was their view on technology in our lives? What did they like and what bothered them?
• How did they feel about aging? Did they ever talk about what surprised them?
• What were they most grateful for in their life?

The other themes

• Who they are: The questions that get past what someone did for a living.
• How they speak: Turns of phrase, filler words, how they open a conversation — the texture most interviews never ask about.
• Memories: Specific moments, not summaries of a decade.
• Personality: How they handle change, order, other people, and themselves.
• Relationships: The people who shaped them, and how they talked about them.
• Values and beliefs: What they thought was worth doing, and why.
• The harder questions: Failure, contradiction, regret. Ask these late, and only if you have earned them.
• Objects, songs and places: A photograph, a piece of music, a room — the fastest routes into a story.