Heritaris

100 Life Story Questions to Preserve a Lifetime of Memories

One hundred questions arranged in the order a life happens. Use them to interview someone, or work through them yourself, a few at a time.

Heritaris Editorial Team14 min read

A life story is not a single story. It is a few hundred small ones that happen to belong to the same person, and the reason so few of them get recorded is that nobody knows where to start.

Chronology solves that. Starting at the earliest memory and moving forward gives the mind a thread to follow, and one answer tends to produce the next. It also means you can stop anywhere and pick up later without losing your place.

How to use this list

Answer six or eight questions at a sitting and stop while you still have something left. Speak the answers if you can; most people tell a story far better than they write one, and a recording keeps the parts that writing removes.

If you are asking someone else, use the questions as prompts rather than a questionnaire. Every good answer contains at least one thread worth pulling, and following it matters more than getting through the list. If you are answering for yourself, keep a note of the questions you skip. The ones you avoid are usually the interesting ones.

100 life story questions

Earliest memories

  1. What is the first thing you can remember, and how old were you?
  2. What was the first home you remember?
  3. Which sounds or smells take you straight back to being small?
  4. Who looked after you day to day?
  5. What did you think the world was like before you knew any better?
  6. What made you feel safe?
  7. What was the first thing you remember being frightened of?
  8. What is a story your family always told about you as a baby?

Childhood

  1. Describe your childhood home in detail.
  2. What was a typical school-day morning?
  3. Who were your friends, and what did you do together?
  4. What did your family do on Sundays?
  5. What were you told off for most often?
  6. What did you collect, keep or hoard?
  7. Were you an indoor child or an outdoor child?
  8. What did you believe about your parents that turned out to be wrong?
  9. What was the best day of your childhood that you can still picture?
  10. When did you first feel out of place?

Adolescence

  1. What kind of teenager were you?
  2. What did you argue with your parents about?
  3. Who did you want to be like at fifteen?
  4. What music, films or books shaped you then?
  5. What did you do on a Friday night?
  6. What was your first job or first money you earned yourself?
  7. Who was your first crush, and what happened?
  8. What were you good at that nobody noticed?
  9. What was the most rebellious thing you did?
  10. When did school end for you, and how did you feel about it?

Young adulthood

  1. What did you do in the year after school or university?
  2. Where did you live first on your own, and what was it like?
  3. How did you support yourself?
  4. What did you spend money on that you now find funny?
  5. Who were your friends in that period, and are they still around?
  6. What did you think your life would look like at forty?
  7. What was the loneliest stretch of that time?
  8. What did freedom feel like then?
  9. What risk did you take that worked?
  10. What risk did you not take?

Love and relationships

  1. Who was your first serious relationship, and what did it teach you?
  2. How did you meet your partner?
  3. What did you notice about them first?
  4. What was the moment you knew?
  5. How did you decide to commit, and was it a decision or a drift?
  6. What was the wedding or the equivalent day like?
  7. What has been hardest about sharing a life with someone?
  8. What ended, and what did you learn from how it ended?
  9. Who has been the most important friend of your adult life?
  10. What do you understand about love now that you didn't at twenty-five?

Work

  1. What was your first proper job?
  2. How did you end up doing the work you did?
  3. What did a normal working day look like?
  4. Who did you learn the most from?
  5. What did you build, fix, sell, teach or make?
  6. What was the worst job you ever had?
  7. When were you most proud of your work?
  8. Did you ever change direction, and what caused it?
  9. What did work cost you?
  10. How did you know when it was time to stop, or has it not come?

Parenthood and family

  1. Did you always expect to have children?
  2. What do you remember about the day each child arrived?
  3. What surprised you most about being a parent?
  4. What did you find hardest?
  5. What did you do differently from your own parents?
  6. What did you repeat despite yourself?
  7. What did your children teach you?
  8. What family routines mattered most?
  9. How did your family change as the children grew up?
  10. What do you wish you had done more of in those years?

Beliefs and values

  1. What were you raised to believe?
  2. What do you believe now?
  3. What changed your mind about something important?
  4. What is worth being stubborn about?
  5. How do you think a person should treat other people?
  6. What role has faith, or its absence, played in your life?
  7. What do you consider a life well spent?
  8. What do you refuse to be embarrassed about?
  9. What have you forgiven?
  10. What are you still working out?

Turning points

  1. What is the single decision that changed your life most?
  2. Was there a chance encounter that altered everything?
  3. What was the hardest year, and what got you through it?
  4. What loss changed you?
  5. When did you start again from nothing?
  6. What illness or accident marked a before and after?
  7. What opportunity arrived at exactly the wrong moment?
  8. When did you realise you had been wrong about something big?
  9. What did you leave behind, and did you miss it?
  10. When did life become easier?
  11. What do you consider the beginning of your real adult life?

Reflections

  1. What are you proudest of?
  2. What has given you the most pleasure, day to day?
  3. What has been the best decade so far, and why?
  4. What would you tell your twenty-year-old self?
  5. What do you regret, and what have you made peace with?
  6. Who shaped you most?
  7. What do you hope people say about you?
  8. What has surprised you about getting older?
  9. What do you still want to do?
  10. What do you want your family to know that you have never said out loud?
  11. If only one story of yours survived, which would you choose?

Turning the answers into something lasting

Answers are only half of it. Keep the recordings and the notes somewhere deliberate, with names and dates attached, or a hundred good answers become a hundred unlabelled files. Preserving family memories covers storage and context, and a family memory book is the most reliable way to make sure the material actually gets read.

Stories worth keeping.

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