Still Time to Ask

The questions you have always meant to ask

Where did your grandmother live before she married? What did your father do the year before you were born? Questions like these tend to wait, until one day the person who knew the answer is not there to ask. Still Time to Ask is a calm, practical guide to sitting down with someone older in your family and recording their life in their own voice.

Bo Bennett draws on the life-interview framework he built. It starts with a broad interview across six parts of a life, taken in short, unhurried sittings. Then come Story Sessions, where the best stories are told in full.

• How to ask permission, record openly and agree on who the recording is for
• Ready-to-use questions on childhood, growing up, work, love and belonging, beliefs, and life today, worded to fit any kind of family
• How to listen: one question at a time, letting silences be, and never finishing a memory for them
• How to approach grief, regret and other hard subjects gently, and when to stop
• A step-by-step first sitting, plus how to label, back up and share recordings

Everything in the book works with a phone and a notebook. One chapter near the end describes the author's own memoir services, and he discloses this up front. The rest of the book names no products. The book is not therapy or legal advice.

This book was drafted with AI from the author's own words and material, then checked by the author.