The commissioned memoir
You know someone with a great story.
Give them a biographer.
An honor once reserved for presidents and poets.
A remarkable life used to need a famous name to get a biographer. Not anymore. A warm, unhurried biographer calls someone you admire — a parent, a mentor, anyone whose stories you love — and asks the questions only a good listener thinks to ask. What they say becomes chapters, and a book with their name on the cover.
One call, one story, one written chapter. No credit card, nothing to install.
From a first phone call — thirty-one minutes
Chapter Two
The Man Who Walked Everywhere
My grandfather Gustavo — homeboy was a trip. By the time I knew him he was a legend in that town. Sixteen hundred people, more or less, and he used to walk the whole thing end to end, every single day, well into his eighties. He’d won a car in a lottery once, back in the States, and when he decided he was done driving, he just gave the thing away to somebody and started walking everywhere instead. Read the newspaper cover to cover every day. Had his own opinions about everything and did not give one single damn whether you agreed with him or not. Climbed trees at eighty, with or without a ladder. Sharp as a tack right up to the day he died at ninety-four.
And near the end, my mother sitting beside him, she said to him, “Life is so hard.” And he told her, “No. Life is beautiful.”
I think about that a lot more than I think about Stanford …
— page 2 of 6 —
From a real chapter. Every chapter is written only from what was said on the call — their words, their humor, their voice. Nothing is ever invented.
How a book begins
- 1.
Tell us about them
Their name, their era, the stories you hope they'll finally tell. Five minutes, once.
- 2.
The phone rings. They talk.
No apps, no screens, nothing to learn. Just a warm voice with good questions and nowhere else to be. Most people are surprised by how their stories take form — and how good it feels to be asked.
- 3.
The chapter arrives.
The childhood kitchen. The day they met. The mischief nobody knew about. In their words, their humor, their voice — written down at last, the way a good story deserves. They read it first — and sharing it with you is theirs to give. Most can't wait.
If the storyteller is you
You already know the stories. We just help you tell them.
If someone has arranged a biographer for you: there is nothing to prepare, nothing to learn, and nothing happens without you. You choose what to talk about, you see every chapter first, and you decide who reads it. The words are yours; the book is yours.
The commission
The book is what they keep. The gift begins with four words: Tell me your story.
They talk. Boswell listens and writes — so the gift never becomes homework.
A human biographer runs $4,500 and up. We built the one families can actually buy.
The First Chapter
Free
Try it yourself: one relaxed call to your own phone, one polished chapter to your inbox. If it doesn’t sound like you, you owe us nothing.
Try it now →The Memoir Project
$495, once
Six to eight conversations over six weeks. Edited chapters as they’re told, then one hardcover with their name on the cover, plus the ebook.
The Standing Call
$89 a month · stop anytime
The calls don’t have to stop. A weekly conversation, a new chapter every month, and a bound volume each year.
Try it yourself, with a quick free chapter
The fastest way to understand Biographer is to be interviewed. Put in your number and your phone rings in about a minute. Tell Boswell one good story — five relaxed minutes — and a written chapter arrives in your inbox, in your words, your voice. Then decide whose book should be next.
“I was just washing dishes and telling Boswell a story when I made a connection that had probably been years in the making.”— an early storyteller
What Biographer is, plainly: Biographer is a done-for-you memoir service. An AI biographer named Boswell telephones the person you choose — often a parent or grandparent — on their ordinary phone — no app, no typing — interviews them with a warm, unhurried conversation, and writes their stories into polished chapters in their own voice, which become a printed hardcover book. It is a gift for someone whose life you admire — for anyone who wants a life written down but doesn’t have forty hours or an interviewer’s skill. The first chapter is free: one call, one written chapter, no credit card. A full memoir — six to eight calls and a hardcover — is $495; an optional ongoing weekly call with monthly chapters is $89 per month. Recording happens only with the storyteller’s spoken consent, the storyteller owns every word and decides who reads it, and private stories are never used to train AI models. Biographer operates in the United States, in English and Spanish.