One sentence in this lecture is a woman saying that she was abused as a child, and elsewhere in it people speak of war and of the wartime camps.
Dave Isay, the founder of StoryCorps, tells of one of the very first interviews recorded in its booths. A grandson had brought his grandmother. At the end he asked her whether there was anything she wanted to tell him that she had never told him. She said, "Well, I want you to know that when I was a kid, I was molested by my uncle." She had told nobody in the family.
Isay says the interview mattered a great deal to her and her family, and that she invited StoryCorps to her ninetieth birthday party, to play the tape. He doesn't say what the grandson did in the minute after she spoke.
The last lecture closed on a question like his, the one you ask at the end of a session to go looking for what you didn't know to ask about. It can find a man's hunting trips. It can also find this.
So what do you do when the story is painful? And what do you do when your narrator's memory is failing?
First, what you settle before the recorder is on. Then the minute itself, where two bodies that train interviewers give different instructions. Then whether telling it does her any good, which is less certain than you've probably heard. And last the narrator who is losing the story itself: a father, with his two daughters at the microphone. Nearly all the advice here was written for trained interviewers of people who lived through genocide, war or the camps, or for families looking after someone ill. None of it was written for a grandchild in a kitchen, and none of it is medical advice, so I'll say whose rule each one is.
Most of what you can do about that minute, you do before it arrives. Two lectures back there was a ranger at Manzanar, the wartime camp for Japanese Americans. Her name is Rosemary Masters, and only once has she had to stop an interview because of what was being said and who was in the room. A man was telling his story, and his nephew was sitting in.
He asked not to go on, and she stopped, because as she sees it a narrator has the right to stop the recording, or the whole interview, at any point. Later she apologized to him in private, and told him he could go on whenever he wished. He and his wife once came out to Manzanar for the day, and she gave them the tour, though she says that really she got the tour from them. When she wrote, he hadn't finished the interview, and she thought he might never. "I am ok with that," she writes.
The first thing to settle, then, is with yourself: this is an interview you're prepared not to finish.
The steps come mostly from the Shoah Foundation's guidelines for its own interviewers, who record survivors of genocide. At the pre-interview, the talk beforehand, ask her whether there's anything she'd rather the two of you didn't go into. Ask yourself, too, what you're afraid might happen, or would find hard to hear. For a relative that may be something about your own family. The grandmother's story was about her uncle.
On the day, before the recorder goes on, put a glass of water and some tissues within her reach, and tell her three things. Said aloud, they're short. Before I switch this on. If you want a break, say so. If you'd rather not answer something, tell me. And if you want this off, it goes off. That's the whole speech. The last part of it is the ranger's, who adds that people often don't want it off.
Willa Baum's tips, from the last lecture, say the opposite: try to avoid switching off for a story she wants off the record, and promise to cut that part afterwards if she asks. Her reason is the record. Allow one story off it, she warns, and more will follow, until almost nothing is recorded. I side with the ranger, because the offer makes the recorder hers. But that pull, the teller against the record, will come back.
And when there's something hard you do mean to ask about, it waits until later in the session, as the last lecture said, and then it's a short open question like any other. What was that like? The remark the Shoah Foundation tells its interviewers to avoid is the one that answers for her, that it must have been terrifying. Later doesn't mean last. Its interviews go on past the worst of it, to the life she made afterwards, and when the recorder is off the interviewer stays a while and asks how she is. If your last question brings the hard thing, as it did in the booth, it has stopped being your last question.
Then it comes, asked for or not. The Park Service has printed an edited excerpt of an interview from Manzanar, without the interviewer's name. Hank Umemoto was held in the camp as a teenager, and in 2016 he was interviewed for the site's oral history collection. Camp life, he said, had been like summer camp. What hurt was being treated as worthless. He said there had been times when he wished he was any other race than his own. Then he was crying, and he said sorry. "But those things I never told my kids," he said. He cried again, and apologized again. And the interviewer said, "No, that's fine, Hank. That's the hard stuff." He went on. Those are the things people keep to themselves, he said, because how could he tell his daughter that he was ashamed of what he was? He put it in the word that had been used against him, and I'll leave that word where he left it.
Look at what the interviewer did, which was to stay, to say eight words, and to say them to his apology. The hardest sentence came after.
What would you have said? The Shoah Foundation and the Park Service would answer differently, partly because they have different moments in mind. The first is writing about accounts that are extremely hard to hear, torture and sexual violence above all. When a narrator becomes very emotional but shows she's all right to go on, its interviewer stays seated and keeps listening, through a long silence if need be. Encouragement is wordless, and the urge to say that it's okay, or that they understand, is held back. The Park Service is thinking of an interviewer who has stumbled into something painful: acknowledge the distress, apologize, and find out whether she wants to continue.
On whether to break a silence like that, I'd ask myself one thing, and I take it from a worry the same guidelines state just before their rule. The worry is the interviewer's own discomfort: that it will distract her, shut her down, or leave her looking after the interviewer. So before you speak, ask whose discomfort the words are for. Tell a crying woman that it's okay, so that she'll stop, and the words are for you. Tell Hank Umemoto, apologizing for his tears, that it's fine, and the words are for him. When she's crying over a hard memory and plainly means to go on, say nothing if you're in doubt, and if words do come, let them be few and for her.
Sitting quietly has a limit, and it's in the same guidelines. If she seems to lose her hold on where and when she is, the Shoah Foundation's interviewers can pause: a break, a cup of tea, and light talk about anything else, until she's back in the room. That is for a memory that has taken hold of her. A stroke is another matter. Britain's National Health Service gives its main signs as a face that droops on one side, an arm gone weak, and speech that slurs or stops making sense. Its instruction is the emergency number, straight away, even if the signs pass. If I couldn't tell which I was looking at, I'd call.
One moment is different, and it's the one in the booth. When someone tells you for the first time that she was abused, saying nothing is not the safe choice. Rape Crisis, which works with survivors in England and Wales, says that for many of them saying or doing nothing, or carrying on as if nothing had been said, is the worst thing you can do. Every survivor is different, it says, and its advice is a place to start: listen, make it clear that you believe her, and tell her it wasn't her fault. A United States health office gives the same three. Rape Crisis goes on. Let her tell you what she needs, and let her know you understand how hard it was to say. Try not to push her for more before she's ready, and don't ask why she didn't say so sooner. That is still few words, and for her.
Then there's the urge to get the rest of the story. Eleanor Mahoney is a historian who has interviewed combat veterans, and one of them had landed on D-Day. Almost sixty years on, every detail was vivid, and he was upset. "I did not ask many follow-up questions," she writes, though she knew there was more about D-Day to be had. "At that moment, his emotional well-being was far more important." She interviewed him again, about the rest of his life, and more details came out.
In the middle of it I'd hold the follow-ups back, as she did. And if your narrator falters, there's the offer the last lecture mentioned for a lost fact. Would you like to leave this for now? If she says yes, or isn't sure, you leave it.
Mahoney noticed something else, and it concerns who you are. A young woman among old soldiers, she found she was sometimes treated as a granddaughter, and she thinks some of the men were shielding her from the worst of it. The archives know a version of this: an interviewer who is overcome may find the narrator protecting her and no longer telling her. So they ask their interviewers to try to keep their own feelings in, and the attention on her. For a relative I'd put it less strictly: you may be moved, and it may show, so long as she isn't left looking after you. And if old soldiers shielded a stranger who put them in mind of a granddaughter, the real one should expect it. Some of it you may never be told.
So far, then. The story is hers before you begin, and in the minute itself you stay, you say little, and you don't press. What nobody here has said yet is whether any of it is good for her.
Go back to the grandmother in the booth, and to a common belief about moments like hers: that to cope with something terrible you have to express what you think and feel about it. In a family it comes out as, it'll do her good to talk. If that were established, it would be a reason to press her.
One study of it began on September 11, 2001, when a survey company e-mailed the members of a national panel one line, which read, "If you would like, please share your thoughts on the shocking events of today." Psychologists followed a national sample of the people who had opened it, for two years. Most had written something. Several hundred hadn't. Which group would you expect to do better? The ones who wrote nothing did: over those two years they reported fewer symptoms of post-traumatic stress than the ones who wrote.
That doesn't show that writing harmed anyone. Nobody was assigned to write or to keep quiet, and the authors' own reading is that the people with the most to say were the ones who'd been hit hardest. What it shows is that the quiet ones were not the ones in trouble, and the authors' advice is to let people choose. Nobody made the grandmother speak. She was asked, and she chose.
Sitting someone down to go back over it is another matter. Fifteen trials tried a single session of that, soon after something terrible. The people who had it were no better protected, and in one trial they were at greater risk of post-traumatic stress disorder a year later.
And was the grandson wrong to ask? Researchers have pooled what people said after taking part in studies of trauma. Being asked had upset some of them at the time, though not extremely, and people generally didn't regret it.
None of that is about treatment. Trouble that doesn't lift, or that begins years later, may be what doctors call post-traumatic stress disorder, and the health service lists treatments for it, talking treatments among them. And none of this is a study of one old person, something long past, and a listener who loves her. The e-mail study's authors say themselves that telling someone supportive, or telling long afterwards, may be different. So my judgment is narrow. Don't promise her it will help. Nothing here says she needs to tell it for her own good, which leaves no case for pressing. And nothing here says a kind question harms her, which leaves no case for never asking.
What the Shoah Foundation does expect, for some survivors of genocide, is trouble afterwards: memories that intrude, sometimes days later. Borrow its routine. Call her the next day, and again a week later. Ask how she's been, and listen for anything she needs. If she seems to be struggling, it's fair to ask whether she has someone to talk to. Its list includes a trusted friend or relative, a religious leader, a social worker or another health professional.
That is where an archive's interviewer stops, as a friendly acquaintance and nobody's therapist. You aren't her therapist either. But you're still her family, and she's being called by someone who would have called anyway. If you think that disorder may be what you're seeing, the health service's advice to anyone worried about someone else is to encourage her to see her doctor. And if she ever speaks of wanting to end her life, its advice is to get her talking and to take what she says seriously: listening, it says, can help more than having answers. The helplines it lists are British, and they also take calls from someone worried about another person, so look up your own country's. If she has seriously harmed herself, or tells you she is about to, that is the emergency number or the hospital, at once.
The other narrator is the one who is losing the story itself, slowly. StoryCorps has a program for people with memory loss, and the recording I'm coming to is among the stories it features. The advice I'll put around it was written for families, by the Alzheimer's Association and by Dementia Australia.
Ken Morganstern was taken to StoryCorps by his two daughters, and public radio broadcast the recording. He had been told five years earlier that he had early-stage Alzheimer's, and his memory had gotten worse. He doesn't remember how he met their mother, or when. "Mom would have remembered," he says. Then a daughter asks whether he recalls dating her. "Oh, yeah. I remember dating her. She was a sexy gal." They had four children, he says, and a daughter asks who they are. He gets as far as the two of them, with help, and says "there's a man in there". A daughter gives him the name, which is David, and tells him David won't be happy when he hears this. Then they ask what his life is like now. "Oh, it's a wonderful life," he says. "I get up in the morning. Go to sleep at night. And in between, three meals."
Sort those questions by what they send him off to do. One sends him into his memory for facts his daughters already have: who are his children? That is a test, by which I mean a question you know the answer to, asked to see whether he does, and it's the one that left him stranded. Dementia Australia tells families not to ask for detailed memories, and the Alzheimer's Association says the goal is connection and not testing memory. Whether he recalls dating their mother is a question a yes can answer, and both bodies, writing about everyday talk, suggest questions of that kind. He answered it with relish. It still asked whether he remembered, and it might as easily have drawn a no. The question he answered whole had nothing to fetch at all: what is your life like now? So for this narrator I'd care less whether a question is open or closed, the rule of the last two lectures, than whether it sends her to fetch a fact. That rests on one recording.
What his daughters did well was everything else. When a name wouldn't come they gave it to him and went on. With any other narrator this course says supply nothing. With this one I'd do as they did. Nurses who study life-story work cite a principle for that: stories lived jointly should be told jointly. Tell it with her. Don't tell it for her. The Alzheimer's Association's other advice is about the room. Make the room quiet and the talk slow, one question at a time, and let familiar places, photographs and music do some of the asking.
Now join the two halves of this lecture. The first half assumed a narrator who can remember your offer and take it up, and this one may not be able to say she wants to stop. So you watch her, and not the clock. The rule Dementia Australia gives for reminiscing is short: if something upsets her, stop and do something else. It also says to avoid questions that might alarm her, so I wouldn't put the grandson's question to this narrator, or go looking for the hard story at all. Keep it short, and plan it with whoever looks after her, who knows her signs. Whether she can agree to be recorded at all is a question for the next lecture.
In Alzheimer's, older memories often stay in reach longest, the Alzheimer's Association says, so I'd go to her youth and to the stories she has always told, and promise nothing. Twenty-two trials of reminiscence for people with dementia found gains that were small and inconsistent, and no harm to them. In the two large ones where relatives joined in, there was a hint that the relatives came away a little more anxious, and that finding is about you.
Back to the booth, and the minute Isay leaves out. This lecture would have had the grandson do very little. Stay in his chair. Say a few words, and say them for her: that he believes her, that it wasn't her fault, that he knows it was hard to say. Then let the silence run, ask for no more than she offers, and call her the next day.
When the story is painful, then, you make it hers beforehand, you stay through it, and you call. When her memory is failing you stop testing her, and you watch her and not the clock.
She told it, and now it's on a recording. That grandmother wanted hers played at her ninetieth birthday. Who decides that, and what you can honestly promise her before she says a word, is the next lecture.
One thing ties the two halves together, and since no manual says it, the ranking is mine. Of the three marks the first lecture gave an oral history, two have pulled against each other all through this one: shaped by the person telling it, and kept so that others can use it. Often you get both. The interviewer at Manzanar stayed with Hank Umemoto and recorded the hardest thing he said. When you can't have both, look at the people I've followed here. The ranger has an interview that stops partway. The historian left D-Day where it was. Two daughters settled for what their father could still tell them. Each of them let the teller win. A recording with the worst of it missing may be the one you did right.