Five Questions to Ask Before Commissioning a Memoir

Every family carries a history worth preserving. But not every history is ready to be told the same way, or by the same hand. Before you begin a commission — with us or with anyone — these are the five questions we believe are worth sitting with first.

Whose voice does this book need to carry?

A memoir can be written for someone, about someone, or with someone, and each version asks something different of the process. A grandparent's record, told in their own words, requires long, unhurried listening sessions and a writer who can disappear behind their subject's voice. A family history spanning generations may have no single narrator at all, and instead needs a structure built from many partial memories, documents, and second-hand accounts. Know, before you begin, whose voice the finished pages are meant to sound like.

How much time does the story actually need?

The instinct is often to rush — a milestone birthday, an anniversary, a diagnosis — and urgency is a legitimate reason to begin. But the material itself sets its own pace. A single life story, deeply told, can take months of conversation to surface fully. A family archive spanning decades may need research alongside interviews. Ask what timeline honors the material, not only the calendar event you're building toward.

What level of detail do you actually want on the page?

Not every memory belongs in print, and deciding this in advance — rather than discovering it mid-interview — makes the process far more comfortable. Some families want the full, unvarnished account: the hardship alongside the celebration. Others want a curated, warmer telling that leaves certain chapters unwritten. Neither is wrong. What matters is naming your comfort with detail before the listening begins, so the person capturing your story knows where the edges are.

Who gets to read it, and when?

A memoir commissioned in secret, as a surprise gift, moves very differently than one commissioned in collaboration with its subject. Consider who will actually hold this book: one person, an immediate family, a wider extended family circulated at a reunion. This affects everything from tone to what stories are appropriate to include — a private letter to one child reads differently than a volume meant for a shelf the whole family shares.

What does "finished" actually look like to you?

A memoir is not only words — it is an object. Before you commission one, picture the book itself: its weight in your hands, the materials it's bound in, whether it's the kind of thing that lives on a shelf to be taken down occasionally, or a working document meant to be added to over years. Knowing what "done" looks like — physically, not just narratively — helps shape every decision that comes before it, from how the interviews are structured to how the final pages are laid out.