The conversation you keep meaning to have
· 3 min read
Ask around and you will not find many people who say their parents’ stories do not matter to them. You will find a great many who have not recorded a single one.
The gap between those two facts is not indifference. It is that the thing everyone imagines doing — sitting down with a recorder, asking good questions for an hour, and then turning what you get into something a family can read — is three separate jobs, and they all land on the same person. Someone has to be the interviewer. Someone has to type it all out. Someone has to write it. Most of us look at that quietly, decide it is a job for a free weekend, and never find one.
The products built for this problem mostly hand the job to the other side of the table instead. A question arrives by email every week and an eighty-four-year-old with arthritis is expected to write an essay about it. That is not a smaller job. It is the same job, given to the person least equipped to do it, and it is why so many of those subscriptions run out with four answers in them.
The competitor is not another product. It is the Sunday you meant to do this and did not.
What actually works is a conversation, because talking is the one thing nobody has to learn. People who cannot type, will not write, and would never fill in a form will happily talk for forty minutes about the summer they turned nineteen — if someone asks, and then asks what happened next.
That is the whole of what we built. Someone in the family sets it up. The person whose story it is presses one large button and talks. What they say becomes chapters, in their own sentences, with their voice kept beside the words. Here is how it works.
There is a deadline on this, and everybody reading knows what it is. That is the uncomfortable part, and it is also the only reason to start this week rather than next year.