A Tell Me Again sample
A Courtship
Peggy Whitfield is an example, not a customer. We’ve written her to show you what the book does, because we’d rather do that than describe it.
Born 1938, Stockport · married Ron in 1959 · commissioned by her daughter
The Same Afternoon, Four Ways
One question, one real answer, shown as each option would deliver it. Everything below is the same afternoon of her life.
Prompt & Print
$49 · you receive the book
“How did you meet Ron?”
You choose the questions. We print them beautifully. The rest is between the two of you.
Guided Completion
$195 · she writes, you bind
“How did you meet Ron?”
“At a dance at the Plaza. He was with a girl called Sylvia from our office. I thought he looked bored. He asked me for the last dance and then if he could walk me to the bus — it was raining & he had no coat!”
Her own handwriting, posted back, proofed and bound into a hardback. The handwriting is half of what the family is keeping.
Full Interview
$595 · two conversations, 120 minutes
“How did you meet Ron?”
“At a dance at the Plaza, though I’d seen him before that and pretended I hadn’t. He came with a girl called Sylvia who worked where I worked, and I remember deciding he looked bored. He asked me for the last dance, and then whether he could walk me to the bus. It was raining and he’d come out with no coat. He walked me to that stop every Friday for eleven weeks before he said a word about why.”
She talks, we write it down. Longer and truer than anyone writes by hand — and it exists at all, which a blank page often doesn’t.
The Written Story
$1,595 · three conversations · the only option that reads as a story
She had seen him before the Plaza, though she did not admit that for some years. He arrived with Sylvia from the office, and Peggy remembers deciding that he looked bored — a judgement she took, in the manner of nineteen-year-olds, as an invitation.
He asked her for the last dance. Then he asked whether he might walk her to the bus, and because it was raining and he had come out without a coat, she said yes partly out of pity. He walked her to that stop every Friday for eleven weeks before he said a word about why.
It is worth knowing what she was walking home to. The cupboard on Lyme Grove held, at all times and seemingly by law, a tin of Carnation milk and a tin of pilchards that nobody ate and nobody threw away. The good biscuits lived on the top shelf, out of reach — a precaution that succeeded only in telling three children exactly where the good biscuits lived.
Eleven weeks of a man with no coat, and a house where the biscuits were kept out of reach. She married him in 1959.
No question printed above it, because it is no longer an answer. The cupboard came from a different question, asked on a different afternoon — prose can put two answers next to each other and let them mean something. A question-and-answer book keeps them in separate boxes, three pages apart.
More Samples
Four other lives, the same set of questions.
- A Working Life — Walter Nowak, thirty-four years on the line.
- A Childhood in Another Country — Beverley Clarke, Jamaica to Birmingham.
- Two Languages, a Grandson Asking — Rafael Villalobos, Guatemala to Houston.
- What If Someone Doesn’t Want to Answer — Joan Petrie, and the questions that go unanswered.
Every book starts the same way: you choose twenty-five questions once, from eight categories and one of your own. What comes back depends on who you’re asking and whether they’ll write.