Most family stories live in memory alone. Too often, no one writes them down. I turn memories into something you can keep.

The first reason is my professional knowledge of how to ask deep, meaningful questions while making the conversation feel calm, natural and alive, even over several hours.

I honed my interviewing skills in isolated villages in the North Caucasus, working with delicate memories and sensitive information. The people I interviewed were cautious and often suspicious. A badly phrased question, a small half-truth, or a lack of respect on my part could end a conversation permanently. Over seventy extensive conversations I have recorded in such a demanding environment is evidence of that skill.

The second reason is the level of care, clarity and faithfulness in my writing. Social anthropology is not built on questionnaires and scientific formulas. The rare material and deep analysis will not get you far if you cannot communicate your ideas in clear, engaging prose. My writing skills were tested not only by peers at Stanford, Cambridge and UCL, but also by audiences and readers who knew nothing about Dagestan or social anthropology.

I have been taught to handle testimony with the care an archaeologist gives to an ancient necklace. And like a professional restorer, I value faithfulness above embellishment. I am not looking for a striking headline or an astonishing revelation, and neither do I place my own prose above the person’s life.

This is where my work differs from many memoir services. Some are warm and well meaning, but offer a polite surface-level chat instead of a careful interview. Others are polished commercial writers, but the finished result can make very different lives sound strangely alike: successful, inspiring, resilient, as if every person were being turned into a LinkedIn profile.

This is for people who want to preserve a story that would otherwise remain scattered in conversation. It might be the life of a parent or grandparent, the story of a marriage or anniversary, or the history of a family business. Or you may simply know there is something worth recording, but not know how to begin.

As a guide, a single two-hour recorded interview with a cleaned audio file and written transcript starts from £400. For many families, one good recorded interview is already a meaningful thing to keep.

A fuller written project usually costs several thousand pounds. Large memoir projects, involving many interviews, research, writing, editing and printing, are quoted individually and can cost substantially more.

You do not need to commit to a large project from the start. The first consultation is free, and we can begin with a small, self-contained piece of work.

A starter project may take a couple of weeks. A fuller life story takes several months, especially if there are several interviews, photographs, documents or family members involved.

We will always discuss and agree on realistic timescale before we begin. As a rule, I would rather work carefully than rush a life story into something thin and generic.

Yes. You do not have to begin with a full book. We can start with one interview, one transcript, or one short written chapter. If it feels right, the project can grow from there.

It can overlap with ghost-writing, but it is not quite the same thing. Ghost-writing usually begins with the aim of producing a book in someone else’s name. My work begins with documentation: careful interviews, attentive listening and a written record shaped from what was actually said.

My training in social anthropology means I was trained to pay close attention not only to what the people say but how they say it. I listen for how a person remembers, what they emphasise, what they hesitate over, and what the story means to them. The aim is to preserve the person’s own story with care for their voice, memory and context.

Yes. Remote interviews by video call or phone are possible. That said, face-to-face interviews are usually better. A person’s home, photographs, objects and surroundings often help memory work. They also give me a fuller sense of the life I am helping to record. I usually prefer to do proper interviews in-person, while follow-up conversations can often be done remotely.

Yes. You can arrange this as a gift for a parent, grandparent, partner or relative. It works better when the person understands the idea and feels respected, not ambushed. I can help you explain it to them in a simple way.

I am not a genealogist in the narrow sense. My main work is oral history: interviewing living people and turning their memories into written form. That said, family trees, documents, photographs and archival records can be included where useful.

That is very common. I would say that two out of three people begin with almost exactly that phrase. Several hours of interview later, Shakespeare and Dickens are not entirely safe.

But jokes aside, people do not love their parents, partners, children or friends just because they are ‘interesting’, do they? They love them because they are theirs.

Of course! Well, for the first couple of minutes that is.

A good interview should never feel like one. Believe it or not, there are no magic questions that good interviewers ask and bad do not. It is not about the questions, it is about the interviewer not standing in your way. My job is to make it so you think, remember and talk naturally.

I once arrived in a village hoping to interview a particular person. I immediately realised that the best approach was not to ask any questions at all. I stayed with the family, lived alongside them for several days, listened, waited, and let the relationship form. Then, one day, the stories began. Not because I had found the perfect question, but because the person was ready to talk. People are different and memory has its own pace.

You do. The finished text is yours and your family’s. You can print it, share it, keep it private, give it to relatives, or pass it down. I do not publish or use your material without permission. If I ever wanted to quote a passage as an example of my work, I would ask first, and you would be free to say no. The interviews, recordings, transcripts and written drafts are treated as private family material.

Yes. I can help turning the existing materials into transcripts, edited story or family booklet.

Yes. Photographs, letters, certificates, diaries, recipes, newspaper cuttings and old documents can all help shape the story. They can be used as prompts in interviews, included in the final book, or organised into a simple family archive.

Social anthropology is about noticing how people make sense of the world. It pays attention to ordinary life: the banal things people usually take for granted, where deeper meanings often sit.

Oral history treats spoken memory as a form in its own right. An interview is neither a casual chat nor written history. Oral narration has its own rhythms: repetition, digression, silence, correction and sudden detail.

Human memory is nothing like a computer file. This is one of the key arguments of memory studies. People remember, misremember, invent, avoid and return. Sometimes silence says as much as speech.

Together, these fields shape my approach. A childhood memory of the smell of a bakery is not the Kennedy assassination, and it is not a scientific fact. You may even place that bakery on the wrong street. But the way you remember and describe it, and the memories and associations it brings to mind, are precisely what I help capture.