Your parent’s life story, before it’s too late
Mum and Dad carry a lifetime of stories that live only in their memory. Your parent just talks to us across a few calls, and we turn what they say into a beautifully written, printed book the family keeps for good.
You keep meaning to write them down
You have heard the stories a hundred times. The childhood home, the first job, the move, the people who are gone now. You always think there will be time to sit down and get it all properly recorded.
Then time passes, their memory goes, and the stories go with it. Writing it down yourself is hard, and asking your parent to do it tends not to happen. So we do it. We sit with them, get the stories out of them, and turn them into a book the whole family will want to keep.
The ones told at every dinner, that nobody has ever actually written down.
The way they say it. The bits a photo never catches.
Why they left, what they were actually thinking at the time. The things you never got round to asking.
They just talk. We do everything else.
A free call with you
We start with a relaxed call to understand your parent, the family, and the book you want them to have. No pressure, no commitment.
We interview your parent
The plan is three or four calls of two and a half hours each. We ask the questions and your parent talks. And if their story needs a fifth call, we make a fifth call. They just have to show up and remember.
You receive the book
We write and print it, you read and approve every page, and a beautifully bound hardback arrives for the family to keep. Finished, by the date you need it.
The kind of book we make
This is our demonstration book. Carol is a composite, and the writing is ours. Your parent's book is written the same way, in their own voice. Click it open.
The oleo was my job. It came white as lard in a plastic bag with a little orange button of dye inside, and you popped the button and kneaded the bag on the table until the whole works turned the color butter was supposed to be. It took forever. My hands ached.
4Written for the family,
to keep.
All through school afterward, people talked about the canteen down at the depot, how the ladies of Dennison fed over a million servicemen through the train windows during the war, coffee and sandwiches handed up day and night. The soldiers called the town Dreamsville. My mother did her shift on Thursdays. I was too little to keep any of it, though I want to say I remember the smell of the coffee down there. I may have built that out of her telling it.
2Our kitchen was the whole house, really. The front room was kept nice for company that mostly never came. The kitchen had a red and white checked oilcloth on the table, wiped down so many times the checks wore away in front of my dad's chair, and a Philco radio up on the shelf by the flour bin. My mother took in ironing, so half the week the kitchen smelled of hot cotton and starch.
People forget that the rationing didn't quit when the war quit. Sugar was rationed clear into 1947, so I was old enough to be sent down to Kail's market with the book and told exactly which stamps Mr. Kail was allowed to tear out.
3Remember It
I was born in March of 1941, in the front bedroom of a house on Grant Street in Dennison, Ohio. My dad liked to say the war and I showed up the same year and only one of us was invited. That was his kind of joke. You had to wait a minute for it.
Dennison was a Pennsylvania Railroad town. The railroad built it and the railroad ran it. The shop whistle blew at seven, at noon, at four, and again at eleven for the night shift, and my mother cooked by that whistle her whole life.
1Remember It
Personally led by a Cambridge writer
With ChapterOne you work with one person the whole way. Every project is led by Myles Howorth himself, from the first call with your parent to the finished, printed book.
Myles studied law and economics at the University of Cambridge, where most of the work was writing. He started ChapterOne on a simple idea: that an ordinary life, written down properly, reads as well as any memoir on the shelf.
When you work with ChapterOne, you work with one person, start to finish, who actually cares about getting the details right.
University of CambridgeLaw & EconomicsWe are taking on our first 10 families
ChapterOne is new, and we are honest about that. We are choosing a small founding group of families at a reduced rate, in exchange for their honest feedback and, if they are happy, permission to share their book as an example of our work.
You take no risk. You read the finished manuscript before you pay the balance. If it does not move you, you do not pay it, and your deposit is refunded. That promise is how we earn your trust before you have to give it.
One book. One founding price.
Your Parent's Book
$1,500
- Three or four guided calls with your parent, two and a half hours each, and more if their story needs them
- A full-length autobiography, written and edited by hand
- Your review, with revisions until you approve every page
- Professionally printed hardback copies for the family
- A digital copy to keep and reprint forever
Reserve your family's spot with a $150 deposit. The balance is due only once you have read and approved the finished manuscript. Money back until then.
Read a free sample chapter
Not ready to reserve yet? Leave your email and we will send you a full sample chapter, so you can see exactly what your parent's book would read like.
Capture their story while you still can
Reserve a founding spot, or book a free call if you would like to talk it through first.