"My life wasn't interesting": a letter to the storyteller

You have probably said some version of it already. "Oh, nobody wants to hear about that." "I didn't do anything special." "Ask your father, he's the one with the stories."

I understand the reflex. My own mother says it. I have asked her more than once to record her story, and she has always said no. I told the host of a podcast about it this month:¹

“Like I've tried to convince my own mother to use the product and she's always refused. She says, I don't know what to say.”

Patrick Donahue, on The Aging Well Podcast

So I am not writing this as someone who thinks it is easy. I am writing it because I think you are wrong about one thing, and I would like the chance to change your mind.

"Interesting" is the wrong test

You are measuring your life against movies and biographies. Against that, almost nobody's life is interesting. But the people asking you are not looking for a movie. They want to know where they came from.

Your granddaughter does not know what your first apartment looked like. Your son has never heard how you got the job you kept for twenty years, or what you did the week your own father died. When you say "there's nothing to tell," what they hear is a door closing on the part of their own story that only you hold.

In a British survey of 2,000 adults, only two in ten knew how their grandparents met, a third couldn't say what their grandparents did for work, and three in ten had learned something new about their family only after a relative died.² That survey was paid for by a life-story charity, so take the exact numbers lightly. The pattern is easy to recognize, though. Most families find out too late what they never asked.

They aren't looking for a movie. They want to know where they came from.

What people actually want to hear

Here is a short list of things families tell me they wish they had recorded. Notice how few of them are dramatic.

• The house, the street, the kitchen. What it smelled like on a Sunday.
• How you met. What you thought the first time you saw them.
• Your first job, your worst job, the boss you still think about.
• A song, and where you were when it was on.
• What things cost. What you did for fun with no money.
• Something you were proud of that nobody noticed.
• What you would tell a twenty-year-old now.

None of those requires you to be a writer, or to remember dates, or to have done anything that would make the paper. They only require you to say what it was like.

It may do something for you, too

I won't oversell this. Researchers have studied people looking back over their lives for sixty years, and the honest summary is that it tends to help a little, sometimes more. The largest review of that work, across 128 studies, found the biggest effect on what psychologists call ego-integrity: the feeling that your life holds together and was worth living. There were smaller gains in purpose and in mood.³ Walking through your life in order, and asking what it meant, helped more than idle chatting about the old days.⁴

That matches what the psychiatrist Robert Butler noticed in 1963. Looking back in later life is not a sign of slipping. It is something people do naturally, a way of making sense of things.⁵ You are probably doing some of it already, in the car or at three in the morning. Telling it to someone just gives it a listener.

What your family loses if you wait

I'll say this gently, because it is the hard part. Nearly half of American adults, in a large YouGov poll, said they regret not recording a conversation with someone close to them who has since died.⁶ Every one of those people had a parent or grandparent who, at some point, said "there's nothing to tell" or "maybe next time."

Your family isn't asking because they think you're running out of time. They are asking because they know they will want this later, and they would rather have it in your voice than piece it together from photographs and a eulogy. You are the only person who can give it to them. A cousin can't. A genealogy website can't. An obituary certainly can't.

There is a generosity in saying yes that people don't always see. You are not performing. You are giving your family a way to know you that will outlast you. The psychologist Erik Erikson had a word for that urge to leave something for the people who come after: generativity.⁷ Most people feel it. Very few act on it, mostly because nobody gave them an easy way in.

You decide what goes in

Some people say no because they worry they'll be pushed into the hard parts. You won't be, not by anyone decent. You can tell the funny stories and skip the sad ones. You can leave out a marriage, a war, a child, a year. A memoir is not a deposition.

Researchers have found that some kinds of looking back are not good for people, especially going over old grievances again and again.⁸ So skipping isn't avoidance. It is good sense. We wrote more about this in telling the hard chapters.

Start with something small

If you are willing to try, don't start with your birth. Start with a door. Pick one of these and talk for five minutes to whoever asked:

1. Tell me about the kitchen you grew up in.
2. What was the first thing you ever bought with your own money?
3. Who was your best friend when you were ten, and what did you do together?
4. What song takes you straight back somewhere?

If five minutes turns into forty, fine. If it stays at five, also fine. You can come back next week.

About the "end of life" feeling

Some people avoid this because it feels like writing your own obituary, as if saying yes means admitting time is short. I get that. But nobody records their stories because they are finished. They record them because they are still here to tell them right. Your family can read a stranger's obituary any time. They can only hear your voice while you're using it.

If you live in a community, or your family is far away

Porchlight was built for people who would rather talk than write. You open a private link on a tablet or phone. There is no password. You tap one big button, a question is read aloud, and you just answer, the way you would to a friend. The questions start easy. You can skip any of them. If you'd rather not look back at all, there's a "just for fun" set: settle an old argument, would you rather, a bit of make-believe. Your family can listen, keep a copy, and send you a voice message back.

And if you are in a senior living community, the people who help you every day can learn a little of who you are: that you ran a switchboard, or fished every Saturday, or can't stand being called "sweetie." That might make a Tuesday morning a little easier.

You don't have to. But someone is asking because they want to know you. That is about the best reason there is.