My sister floated the idea last Christmas and we split the cost between us, mostly because our dad tells the same five stories at every holiday and we figured we’d at least get them written down somewhere.

The way it works is simple enough. Once a week Storyworth emails him a question. Stuff like “what was your first car” or “tell us about the house you grew up in.” He writes back, the answers pile up over the year, and at the end they print the whole thing as a hardcover book.

For the first couple of months it was honestly great. The weekly question gave him something to push against, which matters more than it sounds, because if you’d just told our dad to “write your life story” he’d have done absolutely nothing. Instead he’d reply to the email, sometimes a paragraph, sometimes three pages about a fishing trip in 1974 that none of us had ever heard about. That part I won’t pretend wasn’t lovely.

Then the gaps started. Around month five he missed a week, then a couple more. Storyworth does send reminders, but reminders aimed at a 71-year-old who is “getting to it, don’t worry” don’t accomplish much, and after a while the nudging sort of became our job instead of theirs. We ended up calling him to ask whether he’d done this week’s question, which is not really the warm gift experience you picture going in.

A few smaller things bugged me too. Adding photos was fiddlier than I expected and the finished book leans really heavy on text. The layout is whatever the layout is, you don’t get a lot of say. And the price adds up once you remember the printed book sits on top of the yearly subscription.

The book did arrive, though, and it is a real book. Hardcover, properly bound, his actual words in it. He got unexpectedly emotional flipping through it on the couch, which I did not have on my bingo card.

So would I tell you to buy it? Genuinely, no strong opinion either way. If the person you’re giving it to actually engages with it, you’ll end up with something worth keeping. If they don’t, you’ll spend a year chasing them and end up with a thinner book than you hoped. We landed somewhere in the middle. Glad we did it, not sure we’d do it again. If I had to stick a number on it, three stars, and please don’t read that as me pushing you toward it or away from it.