THE ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
ORAL HISTORY
INTERVIEW YOUR FAMILY TO UNCOVER STORIES AND BRIDGE GENERATIONS
Elizabeth Keating
TarcherPerigee, 224 pages, £18.99
Elizabeth Keating starts her book with a confession. Despite her professional training as an anthropologist (she's a professor at the University of Texas at Austin), she relied on the wrong questions when she interviewed her elderly mother as part those experiences. By the time this realisation had hit the author, her mother had sadly passed away, leaving questions that can now never be answered.