The Memory Palace

Twenty questions to ask your parents

These are not meant to be asked all at once. Pick three and put the kettle on. The best answers come when nothing is at stake.

Write down what you hear, or put your phone on the table and let it record. This is not about getting a polished story. It is about the voice being there.

When they were small

  1. 1.What did the street you grew up on look like?
  2. 2.Who else lived in the house?
  3. 3.Where did you sleep, and what could you hear when you lay awake?
  4. 4.What did you eat on an ordinary weekday?
  5. 5.What did you most like doing when you had time off?

Their parents and grandparents

  1. 6.What did you call your grandparents?
  2. 7.What work did they do, and what did that work look like?
  3. 8.What is the one story about your grandparents you have never forgotten?
  4. 9.Which of them do other people say you take after?
  5. 10.Is there something you wish you had asked them?

Choices

  1. 11.What did you want to be when you were sixteen?
  2. 12.How did you end up doing what you actually did?
  3. 13.When was the first time you were really on your own?
  4. 14.Which decision changed everything, even though it seemed small then?
  5. 15.What are you proudest of that you have rarely talked about?

About us

  1. 16.How did the two of you meet?
  2. 17.What went through your mind when I was born?
  3. 18.What was the hardest part of being a parent that you did not say out loud at the time?
  4. 19.What do you hope my children know about you?
  5. 20.Which photograph in the house means the most to you, and why that one?

Two things that make a real difference and cost nothing

Write on the back of the photographs who is in them. In pencil, not ballpoint. In twenty years nobody will know, and right now you still do.

Do not keep everything. Keep the best. A hundred photographs where you know who is in them are worth more than three thousand where nobody does.