From the founder of Biography Studio
I will be honest with you about something. Before Biography Studio existed in any formal sense, I started doing what I suppose was a very early version of it myself. Not systematically. Not with a platform or a framework. Just thinking about questions. What would I ask someone about their life if I wanted to really understand it? What had I asked, over years of ethnographic research, that had produced the most honest and unexpected answers?
I had spent a career asking other people those questions. I had never really faced them down myself.
So I started. Informally, sporadically, in the gaps between other things. I would think about a question, turn it over, write something down. And then something happened that I had not anticipated. The questions stayed with me. I would answer one and then find myself going back to it two days later with something I had not included. A name I had forgotten. A detail that changed the shape of the whole answer. I would be walking somewhere and a memory would surface that belonged to something I thought I had already finished with.
That was when I understood where the value actually lived. Not in the answer I had written down. In the process of the question staying open.
I am not here to tell you the right way to do this. What I want to do is share what I found, and why it made me so certain that the way you hold this project matters as much as what you put into it.
The difference, I have come to think, is roughly the difference between a floppy sandwich eaten at your desk and a proper meal with good company. Both fill you up. But they are doing completely different things.
What this project really covers
The first thing worth saying is that this project covers more ground than most people expect. It is not just childhood. It is not just memories of your parents and grandparents. By the time you have worked through all the chapters, you will have revisited your teenage years and the cringeworthy, vivid, sometimes surprisingly tender material that lives there. The phase you went through. The music that felt like it was written specifically for you. The friendship that mattered more than you ever said at the time.
You will have gone back through the untethered years of early adulthood, which for me means China and the chaos and freedom of doing my PhD somewhere I had never expected to live, the discovery of a whole culture I had not known I would love, the long nights and the strange cities and the version of myself I was in my late twenties that I can barely recognise from here. For you it might be university, or the first flat, or the early jobs that went nowhere and the one that accidentally mattered. These are years that tend to be underestimated in memory because we were looking forward through them rather than at them. The project asks you to look back.
Then the chapters about love, and the particular feeling that comes from looking at your entire relational life in one place. How much has been given and received. How many people have mattered. The friends you have not spoken to in years who were, for a certain period, the most important people in your world. The chapter on culture, which gave me back my politics and my music and the films that shaped how I see things, and let me be opinionated about all of it in a way that daily life rarely permits.
And then the Wisdom chapters, which are different from all the others. Not looking back but looking at what it all amounted to. What you believe. What you want to leave behind. What you would tell someone just starting out, with the authority that only a whole life of experience can produce.
Every time I have sat with one of these chapters properly, something has surfaced that I did not expect.
Why new questions change everything
Here is something I have noticed about the circular conversations we have with the people we love.
We all have them. The parent who tells the same three stories every time you visit. The relative whose conversational range feels narrower every year. And there is a temptation, when you are on the receiving end of the same yarn for the fifteenth time, to feel a kind of low-level frustration. To switch off slightly. To wait for it to finish.
What I think is actually happening in those moments is that the person telling the story has run out of new questions to answer. Nobody has asked them anything different in years. They are not boring. They are stuck.
The questions in Biography Studio are, among other things, a way of getting unstuck. If you have a parent you want to know better, or a relationship that has settled into its grooves, try taking a question from one of the chapters and asking it over dinner. Not as a project, not with a phone out. Just as a question. What was the first home you actually remember? Who was the teacher you liked most, and why? What did you spend your pocket money on?
You will be surprised where it goes. The same person who has been telling the same stories for years will suddenly be somewhere else entirely, somewhere they have not been invited to visit in a long time. Be interested in the people you love. There will be a moment, sooner or later, when that interest can no longer be satisfied. And those are always the moments when it is too late.
I want to say something about the right attitude for doing this, because I think it makes more difference than any practical advice.
If you approach this project with the goal of producing a book, you will produce a book. It may even be a good one. But you will have treated the process as a means to an end, which is a bit like going to an extraordinary place and spending the whole time photographing it for other people rather than actually being there.
The project is the thing. The slow afternoons with a question in front of you and a memory beginning to surface. The moment you find yourself laughing at something that happened thirty-five years ago and had completely left your consciousness until this question pulled it back. The realisation, somewhere in the middle chapters, that you have been going back through a whole life and the texture of it is so much richer than you had remembered from the outside.
Let it take as long as it takes. Go back and add things. Change an answer when something better surfaces three days later. Use it as a reason to call your sister and ask if she remembers the same thing you do. Let the questions be the start of conversations rather than just prompts for solitary reflection.
The book at the end will be better for it. But more than that, the experience of making it will be something you will not regret having given properly.
What you put into this is what you will get out of it. Not in the sense that it will be disappointing if you do not do it perfectly. It will not be. Any honest attempt to go back through your life with these questions will produce something worth having.
But in the sense that the project expands to fill the attention you give it. Bring it a quiet hour and it will give you an answer. Bring it a season of your life and it will give you something else. The treasure is proportional to the excavation.
I found that out the slow way. I hope you find it out the faster one, by reading this before you begin rather than after.
Biography Studio guides you through your life story, in your own words, at your own pace. The questions are ready. The rest is yours.