The Augustine Project

Interview Someone You Love Tonight

Ten questions. A phone. Twenty minutes. Nothing to prepare.

Print this page

Before you start

• Any phone works. Open the voice memo app, press record, and put it on the table between you — not in your hand.
• Say the date, your name and their name out loud at the beginning. That one sentence is what makes the file usable in fifty years.
• Ask one question, then stop talking. The best answers arrive after a silence that feels slightly too long. Do not fill it.
• When something surprises you, ask what happened next, or what that was like. Those two follow-ups are the whole craft.
• You will not get through all ten. That is normal and it is fine.

The ten questions

1. What name were you given at baptism, who chose it, and what were you told about the saint it came from?
2. What did the inside of your childhood church look like — where your family sat, what you could see from there — and what has happened to that building since?
3. What language did your family pray in at home, and what language did you confess in?
4. Walk me through an ordinary Sunday when you were a child, from waking up to going to bed.
5. What was on the walls and shelves of the house you grew up in, and who put it there?
6. What does this family still do that nobody can explain any more — a blessing, a food, a day, a small thing at a door?
7. When was it difficult or costly to be Catholic, and what did you do?
8. Who was the priest or the sister who changed something for you, and what did they actually do?
9. What changed in the Church during your lifetime that you felt most — and was there a time you doubted, or thought of leaving?
10. What do you want your great-grandchildren to know about you?

---

When you finish

• Rename the file the same day: surname, first name, and the date. Paull-Rose-2026-09-07 will still make sense to a stranger in 2090.
• Put a copy somewhere that is not the phone. Email it to yourself and to one relative in another household.
• Fill in the consent and details card while you both still remember the names that came up.
• Book the next twenty minutes before you leave the room.