The stories you keep meaning to ask about
Choose the questions you would like your parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle or yourself to answer.
We can even do the asking for you, and give the answers back as a book.
The problem
You have heard the stories but you might have missed the details.
You’ve heard about the boarding house, the first job, the winter the pipes froze. Yet, you couldn’t tell any of them properly if you had to. Most people don’t leave it too late on purpose — they leave it because the asking feels enormous.
When remembering has got harder
Some open-ended questions people can struggle with.
Tell me about your childhood produces a silence, and then embarrassment, and then a change of subject. What did your mother’s kitchen smell like on a Sunday produces an answer. The senses hold on long after the dates let go.
Gentle questions option
Concrete, sensory, anchored to one moment rather than a decade. Marked as gentle questions when you choose. Yes, that includes dementia — we won’t pretend otherwise, but we won’t make a lesson of it.
Or we ask, instead
If a conversation is the only way this is going to happen now, that’s what the interview is for. Before this I spent fifteen years alongside families in hospital rooms, where asking careful questions of someone tired or frightened was simply the job. It is the part of this I already know how to do. Nobody is asked to perform.
Before you decide
Questions You might have.
Plain answers, before you choose anything.
Four Steps for Prompt & Print.
Only Two Are Yours.
You Choose the Questions
About twenty minutes. Choose three from eight categories and write one of your own. Twenty-five questions in total. The form for choosing the questions opens as soon as you’ve paid, and the same form asks which cover you want.
We send you the cover and your questions
Usually within two working days, you get an email showing the cover, with the storyteller’s name on it, and your twenty-five questions in order.
You say yes
Nothing is printed until you approve it. If a name or a spelling is wrong, reply and we will fix it — we answer within two working days. If we have not heard from you after seventy-two hours we check in once, in case the email went astray.
The workbook arrives
The workbook arrives with their name on the cover: twenty-five questions, each with two facing pages to write on. Allow up to four weeks, door to door.
“Sweeping at Dodge Main, 1957. I was 16. My dad got me on.”
– from Walt’s workbook, a Tell Me Again sample. Read Walt’s story
Steps Beyond Prompt & Print
It arrives emptyCoil bound, so it lies flat to write in7 × 10 in · 58 pages
Guided Completion
The same workbook. The storyteller fills it in and posts it back to us with the prepaid label we include.
For $195
What was your first job, and what did it teach you?
Sweeping at Dodge Main. 1957,I was 16. My dad got me on.He was on the line 31 yrs.Never said it was a good job.Said it was steady.
They write in itTheir own hand, on the book’s own linesWalter Nowak is an example, not a customer
the Difference
We photograph every page and place their answers, in their own handwriting, in a hardback 8½ × 11 inches with their name on the cover.
It comes back boundEvery page photographed, their handwriting kept8½ × 11 in · case wrap
Guided Completion Plus
For $345 the same book carries a typed page facing each handwritten one.
Keepsake — bought Prompt & Print, filled it in, and then wanted it bound? That is $146. $49 plus $146 is the same $195, so deciding later costs nothing, and there is no deadline on it.
Full Interview
Two conversations, 120 minutes – $595
Three conversations, 180 minutes – $850
The finished product is the same 8½ × 11 inch hardback as Guided Completion.
What comes backTheir answers, in their own words, bound8½ × 11 in · case wrap
The Process
We interview the storyteller, using the questions you chose, and write their answers into the book for them.
Built for families where the storyteller will not or cannot sit down and write.
Conversations
They are one hour each, on separate days, by telephone.
That is deliberate: an hour is what most people can comfortably do, memory works better with gaps, and things surface between conversations that we can follow up.
The Written Story
Three conversations – $1,595
Four conversations – $1,950
Finished product – 6 × 9 inch hardback, case wrap.
What comes backA continuous story, about 16,000 words6 × 9 in · case wrap
Everything in the Full Interview, plus:
The conversations are written up as a continuous life story in prose rather than answers under questions.
This is the only option where the finished book reads as a narrative, at about 16,000 words. It includes two rounds of revisions.
Photographs can be included
If they are, the whole book is printed in colour on white paper rather than cream, because that is how the printer works.
Where Every Book Starts
Every book starts with your questions and their name on the cover. The other three ways add the parts you’d rather hand over: the binding, the asking, or the writing.
The workbook only.
Workbook and hardback with handwriting plus a typed page facing it.
Order Guided Completion PlusNothing for them to write. Completed in two conversations.
Order Full Interview – 2 conversationsNothing for them to write. Completed in three conversations.
Order Full Interview – 3 conversationsA continuous life story, about 16,000 words over three conversations.
Order The Written Story – 3 conversationsA continuous life story, about 16,000 words over four conversations.
Order The Written Story – 4 conversationsCopy of the finished hardback.
Another copy to write in.
A second hardback at 17 point.
Hardback after returned workbook.
Not ready to choose yet?
Ask me something first.
I’d rather answer a question than sell you the wrong thing. Messages come to me, not to a team.
Or email me directly: hello@tellmeagainbooks.com