Your private biographer
Joan is a private biographer: it builds trust over time, asks thoughtful questions, remembers what has already been shared, follows unfinished threads, and helps uncover the details that make a life recognizable.
Why this is missing
Most families can tell you a fair amount about their grandparents. Go back one generation further and it thins out quickly — a name, a country, one story repeated so often that nobody is certain of it anymore. The stretch in between tends to go quiet.
That is not any one family failing to write things down. Photo albums keep faces. Ancestry records keep names and dates. Neither keeps someone explaining why they made the choices they made, which is the part that explains a family to itself.
Joan exists to catch that before it goes quiet — not by asking someone to write a memoir, because almost nobody does, but by calling, listening, and turning an ordinary conversation into something still readable long after the conversation is itself a memory.
What it does
Not a feature list. Six we can name. Two Joan keeps. Joan is only useful to the degree it does all of them.
The archive, the provenance, and printed books are the parts that exist. Audio editions and alternate editions are being built, and the site will say so plainly when they are ready.
Joan’s own.
The rest stays with Joan.
Trust
A stranger asking your mother about her life has to earn the right to hear the answer. That is done by behaving a certain way, repeatedly, not by describing yourself as trustworthy.
Comparison
Each of these is a reasonable thing to buy, and one of them may be the right thing for you. They are different products.
What it isEveryone gets the same questions in the same order, and the storyteller has to sit down and write the answers.
How Joan differsJoan asks in response to what was just said, and the storyteller talks instead of writing. Nothing arrives as a blank page.
What it isYou end up with the raw audio and a word-for-word transcript, which is accurate and almost nobody reads twice.
How Joan differsJoan shapes each conversation into a story someone will actually read, and keeps the recording attached to it so the two can always be compared.
What it isA professional writer interviews the subject and writes the book in their own craft, on their schedule, usually for thousands of dollars.
How Joan differsThere is no human writer between the storyteller and the page. Joan does the shaping, the storyteller approves it, and we say so rather than implying an editorial staff that does not exist.
What it isResearchers and writers produce an authoritative book about a notable life, over months, for tens of thousands of dollars.
How Joan differsJoan is for ordinary lives, which are not less interesting. And the product is the archive rather than the book, so it keeps growing instead of being finished and shelved.
The first chapter
One conversation, one finished story, the recording it came from, and no card. Whether your parent will actually enjoy this is not something a website can answer.