A book about your grandma — the life she lived before you.
This is a book about your grandma’s life — for her, not a picture book for a child. Tell us what your family knows: the town she left at nineteen, the job she did before she married, the sayings she repeats, the two stories everyone tells at Christmas. We write it as a full-length book of her life, and you read every word before she does.
Instant & digital · you approve it first · short ~$19 · full novella ~$29
The questions you can’t ask her any more.
You know her as your grandmother. She has been that for your entire life, and before that she was somebody else entirely — and the somebody else is the part nobody wrote down.
Which year did she leave home? Was it a small town, and did she cry on the bus? What did her mother cook that she has never quite managed to reproduce, though she has been trying for fifty years? What was the job she did before she married — the one that comes up once, at a wake, and then gets changed to a safer subject? Which of her brothers did she fall out with, and was it ever mended?
These are ordinary questions. They are also the whole interior of a life, and they are the first things to go. Not at the funeral — earlier than that. At eighty-eight the answers are still warm, but the thread of them has begun to fray, and the person who could have asked properly was busy, and assumed there would be another Christmas.
The result is a family that can describe their grandmother’s kitchen in precise detail and cannot say what she wanted when she was twenty-two. That is the gap this book exists to close. Not a tribute, not a scrapbook of the photographs everyone has already seen: an actual account of her life, written out in chapters, with the year she left home in it, and the dog’s name, and what she thought of the town she never left.
A book does not buy back time. It does mean that in thirty years her great-grandchildren can read what the house smelled like and how she met your grandfather, in sentences rather than in a shrug.
Two people buy this book, for different reasons.
Both are good orders. They need different reassurance, so here it is, plainly.
“I want her story on paper.”
You are somewhere between twenty-five and forty-five. You have a phone full of photographs of her, three of which are any good, and one voicemail you have never deleted. You are the one who actually asks her questions at dinner while everyone else talks over her. You will do the answering yourself, from what you remember, and ring your mother twice to check a date.
“A book my children will read when she is ninety.”
You are her son or daughter, and you can see the shape of the next ten years more clearly than you would like. You are not really buying this for her. You are buying it so that your own children, at forty, will have a book about the woman who taught them to make pastry. You know more than anyone else alive, and you have been meaning to write it down since about 2019.
If you are the grandchild, the thing to understand is that not knowing her early life is normal and it is not a problem. You are not being tested on her biography; you are giving us the pieces you have, and the pieces your mother has, and we do the rest. If you are her child, the thing to understand is that nothing goes into the book that the family would not say out loud at the table. You approve every page before anyone else sees it, and you can take a chapter out.
You have probably looked at a fill-in journal.
The one called Grandma, tell me your story, with the floral cover and the ribbon. Fifteen pounds, and it is a beautiful object. It is also a blank book with good intentions, and it needs an eighty-two-year-old to sit down and write a memoir by hand.
Ask anyone who has bought one. The first four pages are filled in during the week it arrives, in her best handwriting, because she is pleased you asked. Then the questions get harder — what was your greatest fear as a young woman — and the book goes on the shelf next to the photograph albums, and stays there. Three years later it is still three-quarters empty, and nobody wants to be the one to bring it up.
This is the other way round. You spend twenty minutes answering, in your own words, from what you already know, and the family fills in the gaps between you. We do the writing. She gets a finished book about her life that she did not have to lift a pen for — one she can read in an afternoon and then correct, loudly, at Sunday lunch, which is the best part.
Six things, and you already know most of them.
You do not need her birth certificate, her immigration papers or a family tree. You need the things that get said at the table.
Her name
Full name, maiden name, and what the family actually calls her. Nan, Nana, Granny, Baba, or her first name, because she never liked the alternatives. The gap between the two is usually the first good detail.
Where she started
The town, the street, the house with the outside toilet. Where she was born, where she grew up, and whether she was sorry to leave it.
Who came before her
Her mother and father, her brothers and sisters — names, and one thing about each. “Ida, who sang” is worth more than a birth year.
The work she did
The shop, the factory, the school kitchen, the years at home that everybody forgets to count as work. What she was good at, and what she was glad to stop doing.
How she met your grandfather
The dance, the bus, the wedding with forty guests and one photograph. And what she says about him now, in the present tense, if he has gone.
The things she repeats
The recipe nobody can get right, the saying you catch yourself using, the holiday that always went the same way. Two stories the family retells, roughly as she tells them.
If she is willing, ask her these eight questions and paste the answers in as they come. Do not tidy them up, and do not fix her grammar — the way she says a thing is worth more to us than the tidiest version of it.
- Where were you born, and what was the house like inside?
- What did your mother cook that nobody else can make?
- What was your first job, and what did it pay?
- How did you meet my grandfather?
- What did you do on a Saturday when you were sixteen?
- Which of your brothers or sisters did you fight with, and what about?
- What was the hardest year the family had, and how did you get through it?
- What do you want your grandchildren to know about you?
You can place the order without her knowing anything about it. Half the books we write are ordered that way — the questions are a bonus, not a requirement, and a blank answer to all eight still leaves us with plenty if you can give us the six things above.
A real excerpt, from a book we published.
Not a sample written for a landing page — this is lifted from a complete published memoir, word for word; its first two chapters are free to read.
Her grandmother’s hands paused. Just for a moment. Then they resumed their folding, quick and sure. “Wanting is a luxury,” she said. “I wanted to eat. I wanted my children to eat. That was enough. That was everything.”
Order it. We write it. You approve it. You give it to her.
Four steps, and the third is the one that matters. Nothing is shared until you have read the whole book and said yes.
Tell us her story
Answer a short set of questions with the facts and the memories — the maiden name, the street, the job, the wedding, the saying. A few minutes of your time.
We write the book
A complete book is drafted from exactly what you gave us — 8,000–10,000 words, or a 25,000-word novella across 20 chapters. Ready in minutes, not weeks.
You read it first
Nothing is shared, printed or sent until you have read the finished book and said yes. You can ask for changes, and you can have the material deleted afterwards.
A private link, or a PDF
Send a link she opens in any browser — no app, no account, no password to remember. You set an access code. She can also keep the PDF and EPUB.
Two lengths. One payment. No subscription.
Read the first two chapters free first — the books on our shelf are complete, not samples.
Short book
Full novella
Every book is digital and instant today: PDF, EPUB and a private reader link. We do not print or post books — if you want one on her shelf, print the PDF locally and we will tell you nothing different.
What if she has already died?
Then the book is written from what the family remembers and from anything she left behind — letters, a diary, the back of a photograph. It is the same book, made in the past tense, and it does not have to be a sad one. A memorial book, if she has died, is written the same way and read at the same pace; the difference is that you cannot ring her to check a date, so cousins get asked instead.
What buyers ask.
Is this a children’s book?
No. It is a full-length book about your grandma’s life, written for adults — 8,000–10,000 words, or a 25,000-word novella across 20 chapters. If you want a picture book for a five-year-old, with her name in the title and a drawing of her on the cover, this is not it, and we would rather say so than take your money.
Does she have to write anything?
No. You supply the facts and the memories, and the book is written from those. If she is willing to answer a few questions it makes the book better, because her own phrasing is more precise than anyone else’s, but the order can be placed without her knowing anything about it.
Can several family members contribute?
Yes — gather answers from siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, and paste them together in one go. More voices means more specific detail: the name of the street, the dog, the shop that closed. That detail is what makes the book read as hers rather than as a generic life of a woman born in 1943.
How is it delivered?
As a PDF and an EPUB, plus a private link with an access code you set — no app, no account, nothing for her to install. You can print it yourself if you want a physical copy on her shelf; we do not print or post books.
What does it cost?
$19 for the short book, 8,000–10,000 words, or $29 for the 25,000-word novella across 20 chapters. One payment, no subscription, and you read the whole thing before she does.
Buying for someone else?
Her life, before it becomes a paragraph at a funeral.
It takes a few minutes, and you read the book before she does.