We want to tell your life story

Call it nosiness, call it a fascination with one’s fellow humans; either way, we’re all interested in reading about other people’s lives.  Here Christopher Middleton meets four writers whose daily work involves getting inside the minds of other people - and telling us all about it.

Evening Standard Tuesday 29 May 2000

There is no official job title for what Michael Oke and Sally Gray do - which is to help other people write their life stories.

My belief is that everyone is special and everyone has a story to tell,”  says Oke, who set up his firm, Bound Biographies, 10 years ago in a Harlesden flat.  “That story may not be of any interest to outsiders, but more often than not, it will be uplifting for family and close friends.”

So far, the firm has produced 79 sets of leather-bound memoirs.  Oke and Gray visit their authors once a month to encourage, advise and tease out memories, often using popular old songs and tapes of Forties and Fifties radio shows to help prompt recollections.  They then take away the latest chapters and get them typed up.

The average biography is 50,000 words, which can fill anything between 250 and 400 pages, depending on the number of illustrations.  Many of the books contain reproductions of everyday items such as school reports and seaside postcards, alongside more formal pictures of weddings and christenings.

Putting someone’s memories down on paper is like tumbling a jigsaw out of a box,” says Gray, a former church worker and secretary.  “Some of the pieces are the right way up, some aren’t.  The fun is to fit them all together.  As for grammar and spelling, I tell our authors not to worry - we handle all that.”