How to interview your great-aunt Maud

Even the most taciturn relative can be cajoled into spilling the beans, says Emma Brockes

How to interview your great-aunt Maud


Generally speaking, if you want to find out what someone's schooldays were like, don't ask them, "What were your schooldays like?" Vague questions tend to invite vague answers, unless your subject is a seasoned raconteur. You are better off asking precise questions and then widening the angle. "What sort of shoes did you wear?", "What did you eat for lunch?" or "Whom did you hate?" are questions that get you into the rich and rewarding world of Spam and friendships and playground politics. What you want are stories that enliven generic statements. So, "we were poor" is not very illuminating, but "we were so poor that when the chicken in the yard swallowed a halfpenny, my father rang its neck to get the money back" is. (I arrived at this particular point with a great-aunt by asking her when she had most hated her father. That's the sort of question you may want to keep back for quite late in the interview.)

People who aren't used to talking about themselves may need drawing out. It goes without saying that even if what they are telling you is tedious, you will behave as if they are reliving the night they went down on the Titanic. Don't interrupt. As they speak, make a mental note of interesting bits that you want to revisit. Ease them in with uncontroversial, fact-based questions about their early life: dates and geography. Whip out old photos and ask them to identify the people and places in them. Conscientiously write these down. Once they are confident of your interest and their ability to hold it, they will relax enough for you to move into more exploratory areas.

Don't be boring
The encounter will be more rewarding for both of you if your subject is encouraged to talk about things he or she has hitherto not talked about. Consider your own life, your most interesting habits and hang-ups, and try to figure out what questions would lead you to spill the beans about them. Assume that however alien your subject's life has been compared with yours, the same basic preoccupations will have underpinned it: love, money, death and ambition. You just need a route into each of them.

It is useful to remember you are not interviewing Richard Nixon. Going in hard, à la David Frost, on whatever constitutes the most shameful episode of your relative's past, will only make them clam up or detest you. If there is a sensitive area you want to explore, wait until it comes up naturally. (If it doesn't come up naturally, it is probably better to raise the issue directly than to dissemble around the edges - but only after you have asked lots of benign, unrelated questions that prove you are not purely interested in scandal.) Once, while idly questioning another ancient relative of mine, it became clear to me that the love of her life, about whom she talked constantly, was not, in fact, her husband. This isn't the sort of detail you can flesh out the family tree with, nor can it be baldly articulated. But it did cast everything else she said in a slightly different light.

"What did you feel?" is a useless question in any context. It sounds intrusive, without actually leading to revelation, but it is particularly useless when applied to someone labouring to narrate a painful memory. The best way to get to "What did you feel?" is to go via "What did you do?" Stick to the facts and the emotions will follow.

Using a tape recorder is easier than note-taking, but it can also inhibit the interviewee. Given that your interview will not be for publication, it is probably better to take notes and fill in the detail afterwards. Better still, I think, is to resist making any notes at all while you are talking, except for names, dates and places. This makes the encounter more relaxed and natural and lets you concentrate on what is being said rather than on trying to get it all down.

Cross reference
If you are doing a straightforward family tree, you will probably want to cross-reference everything one family member says against what the others have said. Beyond that, however, people's memories are bound to contradict each other, and you shouldn't hold them up to some illusory ideal of the definitive account.

Only write down questions in advance if you are willing to abandon them when something more interesting comes along. They are really just a safety net in case the conversation runs dry. Memorise them so you can make steady eye contact instead of staring rigidly at your notebook.

The main thing to remember is that most people want to tell their stories; all you are doing is teasing out the lively stuff.

Follow up
If access to your interviewee isn't a problem, you should keep your conversations short and then repeat the exercise until you both feel you have done it justice. A little and often can be much more productive than a long, exhausting session, and a more layered picture will emerge over time.