My grandmother and me.
I knew my grandmother my whole life, and I still never knew what to ask her.
I could tell you what her kitchen smelled like. I couldn't tell you what she was like at twenty, or what she'd hoped for before any of us existed. The stories were always there — I just never found the questions.
That's the part most of us get stuck on. "Tell me about your life" is impossible to answer. But ask someone what their street sounded like on a summer evening, or what they and their father never agreed on, and something opens up.
So Roots is built around the asking. Hundreds of questions written to draw out the things people rarely think to mention, recorded in their own voice — so you keep how they said it, not just what they said.
It's for the conversations worth having while everyone's still around the table.