If you don’t have time to keep a blog or a paisley-covered diary, haven’t been able to get your significant other to complete Philipp Keel’s fill-in-the-blank journal All About Me, and can’t interest your parents in picking up their dusty copy of Bob Greene’s To Our Children’s Children: Preserving Family Histories for Generations to Come, there’s always Susan Rose to take down your memories. Rose is a personal historian, which basically means she’s a biographer for hire. She figures the time is ripe for someone with her particular expertise. “Our culture as a whole is focused inward a lot, on the more intangible things,” she says. “People’s memories are pretty valuable, I think, and if you don’t record them they really fade quickly.”
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On her Web site (www.treeinthe forestproductions.com), Rose suggests that the standard milestones–graduation, marriage, the birth of a baby–are ripe for documentation. But she makes it clear she’ll listen to–or avoid prying into–just about anything. (When she interviewed me to demonstrate her technique, I suggested we talk about my collection of tchotchkes from around the world and avoid my painful junior high years.) For a fee of around $500, she’ll come to your home, plug in her tape recorder, and conduct an hour-long personal interview, accepting no more hospitality than a mug of hot water. A pre-interview questionnaire helps her focus; you can also hire her to talk to, say, your grandparents or your sister to gather their memories. After transcribing the tape, she’ll let you edit out unwanted portions. Then she shapes the material into a polished form that goes into a photo album, leaving room for pertinent photos and other memorabilia. You get to keep the original cassette.
By then her parents were living in Albuquerque, and she briefly attended the University of New Mexico before she was discovered again–this time by a television station. “I managed to get an interview with the local CBS affiliate and got a job as an assistant producer, but I kept bugging them to let me be the reporter.” Her persistence paid off. For a year she worked in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where, “in the middle of nowhere,” she was her own field reporter, writer, producer, and editor. Eventually she moved back to Albuquerque and started anchoring newscasts, which entailed doing live interviews. “I’d gotten to a point where I knew what I was doing, but I was thinking to myself, ‘I’m interviewing Bea Arthur–Maude. How am I going to get to Beirut?’”
Rose still holds a day job too, again working for the federal government as an interviewer. “I’m adjudicating requests for political asylum, and I’m interviewing people about the worst kinds of things, and in a lot of detail. Torture and really bad stuff–vicious beatings and abuse–and I’m going from that to somebody talking about their most wonderful day.” She’s guessing that in this age of self-confession, sooner or later a client is going to want to record their most painful experiences. She looks at what she’s doing now as “training for that.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Nathan Mandell.
