Memories

One evening, remembered properly, is worth more than a decade summarised.

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

• What is your earliest childhood memory?
• Tell me about one day from school life — a day you remember clearly.
• Describe the home you grew up in. What did you see when you walked in the door?
• What was a turning point in your life — a moment after which everything was different?
• What was the period when you felt happiest?
• Did you move significant times in your life? What did you feel when you left and when you arrived?
• What smell immediately takes you back to childhood?

Using these

Push for the specific every time. If an answer arrives as a general truth about a period of life, ask when it happened, who else was in the room, and what the weather was doing. The detail is what makes it theirs.

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.

• What was their earliest childhood memory, as far as you know?
• Share a memory from their school life — a day that stood out.
• What do you picture when you think of them walking through that door?
• What was a turning point in their life — a moment after which everything was different?
• What was the period when they seemed happiest?
• Did they move significantly in their life? What did they feel when they left and when they arrived?
• What smell do you associate with their childhood?

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.
• 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.
• Everyday life: What an ordinary day actually looks like. The detail that vanishes first.