The Book as Bridge: Why a Story Can Cross What Distance Can't
I didn't really know my grandfather until I read his book after his funeral. That's why I'm building Memolio.
Last year I stood at my grandfather’s funeral in South Africa and realised I hadn’t really known him.
I knew him as the man who’d built a beautiful garden out of an empty plot in his retirement. I knew him as the person who could hold forth on the Boer War or the Second World War for hours — which, on long car journeys as a seven-year-old, I would encourage enthusiastically to the quiet despair of my brother and sister, who did not share my morbid fascination with industrial-scale conflict. I knew him as a voice on the phone that came less frequently as I grew older and the cost of flying from London to Cape Town began to feel like a luxury rather than a given.
But I didn’t know him. Not really. And standing in that sea of black clothes and sad faces, I couldn’t work out exactly when the gap had opened up.
The Gap That Grows Quietly
My mother is South African. I grew up in the UK. In childhood, distance was just a fact — we visited every few years, and in those visits I’d get to ride on his shoulders and pepper him with questions about history that he’d answer patiently and with obvious delight. But as I got older and started paying my own way, the visits became rarer. And somewhere in that drift, the questions I had for him — the ones that actually mattered — became harder to ask.
Not because he wouldn’t have answered. But because asking felt forced. It felt like imposing. He was a humble man who seemed to think his own life was too ordinary to be worth a proper conversation. The grand historical sweep was easier territory than the personal — he could talk about the Huguenot migration or Rommel’s campaign without it feeling awkward. But asking “what were you like when you were young?” without a reason or a context behind it? That requires something.
A seven-year-old asking questions out of pure curiosity is easy. An adult asking the same questions has to overcome years of accumulated social training that says nosiness is rude and other people’s feelings are fragile. The window for those conversations is surprisingly small, and once it closes, it closes quietly.
The Book on the Shelf
After the funeral, I found a family history book he had put together in his final years. It was, like him, meticulous and humble in equal measure. Chapters and chapters on the Huguenot migration, the Anglo-Boer War, genealogies of relatives long dead — all carefully researched, all beautifully written. But the parts that stopped me in my tracks were the sections where he talked about his own early life: collecting bird eggs as a boy, struggling to find a career that felt right, falling in love with my grandmother, having five children in quick succession and somehow making it work. He’d written these sections almost apologetically, always steering the narrative back toward the people around him rather than himself.
Reading it, I felt two things at once: profound gratitude that he’d written it at all, and a deep sadness that I hadn’t read it while he was still alive. The parts I’d have asked him about, the details I’d have wanted to see — his young face, the texture of the world he’d grown up in, the emotion beneath the careful, modest sentences — those were gone. That’s where the idea for Memolio came from.
Why It Has to Be a Book
There’s no shortage of ways to preserve memories digitally. Voice recordings, photo albums, Google Drive folders. The problem isn’t the technology. It’s that digital things disappear — not always dramatically, but reliably. Files get buried. Hard drives fail. Cloud storage runs out or changes its pricing model. A video of your grandfather explaining how he met your grandmother sits unseen in a folder you haven’t opened in four years.
A physical book doesn’t do that. A physical book sits on a shelf and waits. It’s there when a child is three and wants to look at the pictures. It’s there when they’re seven and can finally read the words themselves. It’s there when they’re seventeen, or twenty-five, or forty, and suddenly — for reasons they might not be able to articulate — want to understand where they came from.
At Memolio, we take a grandparent’s real memories and real photos and turn them into a personalised illustrated story — the kind that a grandparent can give to a grandchild and read together at bedtime. The illustrations bring the stories to life in a way that old photographs, however precious, never quite can: faces infused with the emotion of the moment, scenes that make a past world feel present and real. The questions we ask grandparents are designed to draw out exactly the parts they’re most likely to gloss over — the personal things, the human things, the early life things. Not because their family history isn’t interesting, but because they are interesting, and they often need permission to say so.
What I Hope Memolio Does
I hope that someday, someone stands at a grandparent’s funeral and feels not just the weight of their absence — but also the warmth of their lingering presence. That they go home and pick up a book they read with their mum or dad about who that person was before they were a grandparent. That the stories don’t disappear with the person who lived them.
That’s the bridge. Not technology. Not a clever product feature. Just stories — told with love, held in hands, passed forward.
If you have a grandparent whose stories deserve to be heard — or if you are the grandparent — we’re building this for you. Follow along at memolio.substack.com, or visit memolio.io when we launch.