A Father's Day gift for a dad who wants to write a book
Fathers are notoriously difficult to buy for and notoriously difficult to interview, and the two problems have the same solution: give him something to do rather than something to feel. A structure, a recorder, and questions about the work, the cars, the years before you existed.
Four things worth knowing before you ask
Plenty of men answer better side-by-side than face-to-face, which is a practical fact rather than a cliche.
- Ask in the car, on a walk, or while doing something with your hands. Sitting opposite someone with a recorder between you is the hardest version of this.
- Start with work. It is the subject most men have language ready for, and it leads everywhere else.
- Ask about his father, and about what he decided to do differently.
- Let the silences run. The useful answer usually arrives about four seconds after you would normally rescue the pause.
Your free private family history Book Coach
A short private conversation, one question at a time, starting from one story you were told. By the end you should have a clearer sense of what the book is about, who it is for, the shape it wants to take, and where to start. It never writes a word for you.
It asks questions and gives you your own answers back. It does not write the book. You can copy or download the finished plan straight from the page, free and with no email needed.
Why this one lands
A great many men of a certain generation will not sit down for a conversation about their life and will happily talk for two hours about a job, a car, a boat or a match. That is not evasion — it is the way in.
The life arrives through the work. Ask what the trade was like when he started, who taught him, what went wrong on the worst day, and you get the man as well.
Why not a notebook
The beautiful notebook is the standard gift here and it nearly always ends in a drawer — not because it is a bad object, but because what stands between someone and their book is not a lack of paper. It is not knowing where to start, not believing anyone would want to read it, and having no structure to follow.
A gift that supplies those three things gets used. One that supplies stationery adds a small, gentle weight of obligation to a pile that already exists.
What to do first
Ask about the first job. Not tell me about your life — the first job, the first wage, the first boss, what he did with the money.
Record it on a phone, not with a notebook out. And do it while doing something else if that helps: driving, walking, in the shed. Side by side is easier than face to face for a great many people.
A note on doing this well
If your father is someone who deflects with jokes, let him. The jokes are usually load-bearing, and the serious material arrives about forty minutes in, once he has stopped performing. Do not rush that.
About Your Book Pro
Your Book Pro is a book-writing platform built in Britain. Start with an idea, notes, half a draft, a podcast, or a finished manuscript, and use our purpose-built AI tools for planning, feedback, editing, proofreading, cover designs, and to create print-ready files. Writing is totally free: you can type, upload or speak your book as much as you like, and use only the editing tools you need with Plus, or go unlimited with Pro.
Produce world-class drafts at the fraction of the cost of hiring a human editorial team.
Every account starts with 1,000 welcome credits, and a plain export of your own words is free.
What you are actually giving. They can talk it rather than type it, which matters for anyone who finds a blank screen intimidating — and most people who have never written a book do. Recordings become clean transcripts; transcripts become chapters; the editorial tools work on the result.
Every account starts with 1,000 welcome credits that never expire. No subscription, no deadline, nothing to cancel. That matters for a gift: there is no clock running, and nobody feels they have wasted your money by not starting until March.
And the Book Coach is free at yourbook.pro/book-coach with no account, so they can try it before you give them anything at all — and so can you.
At the end there is a printed book. A single proof copy is around £4.25 plus roughly £4.15 UK shipping. For a great many people, holding it is the whole point — and it is worth ordering one early, at the messy-draft stage, because paper makes a book feel possible in a way a file never does.
Try the Book Coach — free, no account
See the question sets
Email me the questionsQuestions people ask
- My dad won't talk about himself. What do I ask?
- Ask about other people and about work. What his father did, who ran the yard, what the town was like. He will describe himself while describing them, and it will not feel like an interview.
- Does the gift expire?
- No. The welcome credits never expire and there is no subscription to cancel — which is deliberate, because a gift with a clock on it becomes a source of guilt rather than a present.
- Do they need to be good with computers?
- No. They can talk rather than type, on a phone, and someone else can do the uploading. Plenty of family books are made by one person recording and another assembling.
- Can I help them with it?
- Yes, and for family stories that is usually how it works — one person interviews, another types or uploads, and the book belongs to everyone.
- What if they never use it?
- Start with the free question sets and one recorded afternoon. Even if no book follows, the recording is the thing families are most glad to have.