How to interview a parent or grandparent about their life

What equipment do you actually need?

A modern phone is sufficient. The voice memo app on any phone made in the last decade records at a quality far beyond what a transcript requires, and dedicated recorders add cost without adding usable fidelity for speech.

What matters more than the device is placement. Put the phone on a cushion, a folded jumper or an armrest rather than a hard table, which transmits every knock and cup placement. Keep it within about a metre of the person speaking, and turn off anything with a fan or compressor in the room.

How long should each session be?

Forty-five to sixty minutes. Beyond an hour, both people tire and the answers shorten noticeably. Under half an hour, you rarely get past the rehearsed version of a story into the detail underneath it.

Expect the first fifteen minutes of the first session to be stiff. Almost everyone performs slightly when a recorder appears, and almost everyone forgets it is there by the second or third question.

The single most useful interviewing habit

Ask your question, then say nothing. Most people fill a three-second pause instinctively, and interviewers are worse at tolerating silence than the people they are interviewing. The material that arrives after a long pause is consistently better than the material that arrives immediately, because the immediate answer is usually the version the person has told before.

When an answer ends, resist moving on. "What else do you remember about that?" and "What did that look like?" will extend a two-minute answer into a ten-minute one more reliably than any new question.

Mistakes that shut a conversation down

Most failed family interviews fail for one of a small number of reasons, and all of them are avoidable.

• Asking two questions at once. The person answers the second and the first is lost.
• Correcting dates or facts mid-answer. It signals that accuracy matters more than the story and makes people cautious.
• Starting with the hardest subject. Grief, estrangement and regret are best reached in a later session, not a first one.
• Filling silences with your own memories. Your recollection prompts agreement rather than recall.
• Interviewing with several relatives in the room. People edit themselves in front of an audience, especially their own children.

Use photographs as prompts

A photograph is the most efficient interview question available. Handing someone a picture from 1968 and asking who else was there produces names, places and relationships that no direct question reaches.

Work through a box of loose photographs rather than an album. Albums have already been curated and captioned, which means the surprising material has usually been left out.

What to do with the recording

Transcribe it, then keep both. Audio is what families most value emotionally, and text is what makes a book possible. Speech-to-text software handles a clear recording well enough that correcting the output is faster than typing from scratch.

Back it up somewhere that is not the recording phone before the next session. Irreplaceable recordings are lost to broken and stolen phones every day.