Meet the memoir man

“Each time he started a story, I would shut him down, saying: ‘Oh, Dad, not that one again, I’ve heard it before,” says Moëd.

“When I took him back to the care home where he lived, I turned to say goodbye and tell him that it would be better next week, and I bit my tongue, because I knew it wouldn’t be.

“He was blind, staring at four walls that he couldn’t even see. My mother was in nursing care on the floor below, dying, and I thought, my God, if that was me, why would I get up tomorrow.”

As he was driving back round the M25, Moëd, a South African-born businessman, vowed he would find a project that would bring some meaning into his father’s life. It was then that inspiration struck.

He recalled that he had given his father a Dictaphone to record memories from his past. The device had sat in a drawer, never used. But what if his father had a sympathetic ear to tell his stories to?

Back at his office, Moëd asked his secretary to visit Jules each week and interview him with the aim of compiling a folder of memories.

“I asked her to listen to his stories and ask him what happened next or how it felt — to do for him what I struggled to do,” Moëd says.

“I wanted him to have companionship and look forward to her visits.”

Sadly Jules passed away before the plan to collect 10 chapters worth of recollections could come to fruition, but there was one surprising revelation.

“In the 16th century our ancestor was a rabbi, Saul Wahl. The king of Poland had died and the tradition there was that one king handed the crown to the next, but they couldn’t be without a king overnight so they looked for a commoner without issue and they found this ancestor of ours and made him king of Poland for the night.

“And my father had never told us that story.”

That was in 2002. Moëd got on with his life, running his airline catering business. Seven years later, he had sold up and, as he says, “was having fun playing polo. I’d bought a farm and turned it into a polo club.”

But a conversation with a friend who was depressed and had given up on life set him wondering whether he should be doing something more.

Moëd and his wife, Yvette, were at that time working with the homeless for Crisis at Christmas and had realised that many of the people they dealt with did not care enough about themselves to want to have a home.

“Those two things — that conversation with my friend and seeing that homeless people didn’t have purpose in their life — were fundamental to me thinking, well, how can I find ways to give people purpose and care about themselves,” he says.

Remembering how telling his stories had given his father something to live for, Moëd resolved to use his business expertise to create a way for people to share the same experience and feel a sense of self-worth.

So LifeBook was born — a publishing company designed to allow people to create autobiographies for their friends and families.

The company launched in 2012 — but not before some scientific research. Moëd says: “We visited a cousin of my wife who was a geriatric psychiatrist at Baycrest in Toronto, a Jewish care centre and brain health institute. We commissioned a research project on the methodology of doing a LifeBook over 12 months, with two of their researchers being trained in the LifeBook interview process.

“It was very successful. The scientists confirmed there was already evidence that regular interventions such as our weekly interviews, where people were reminiscing, would contribute to slowing down cognitive decline.”

Moëd had come up with the idea that an interviewer would visit the author at their home to record their memories, and a separate writer, anywhere in the world, would turn the interviewer’s recordings into the actual memoir.

The interviewer, says Moëd, “will live within 30 minutes of where our author is. The interviews are always face to face. You do not want someone breaking down during recounting a tragic story about the death of their son while their Skype connection is buffering.”

Interviewers are picked for their powers of empathy, while writers are selected so that their cultural or religious backgrounds match those of the authors. As Moëd says: “There’s no point if someone says it was yom tov or that he was a nebbish and the writer has to Google it.”

The process of creating an autobiography takes several months. “It’s 12 meetings, each 90 minutes, all recorded,” says Moëd. “The first 10 are interviews,” with the interviewer guiding the author through their lives. 
“Every two sessions, we send a printed review to the author to check for errors or omissions and to make sure they like the writing style.”

Photos and documents are scanned by the interviewer so they don’t have to be taken away from the author’s home.

“The 11th meeting is where the whole book is edited together,” says Moëd. “The 12th meeting is where we give them the galley proof where they can see everything ready for typesetting and they can sign it off for print.

“We also get the author to read out their favourite stories and produce a one-hour recording on a USB stick, so now they’ve got that as audio forever. We add in all the photos from the book, which have been improved or repaired before printing, so the family has everything in one place.  And then we provide ten hand-made copies of the book in a gift box.”

Typically authors will be in their 60s or older. Often members of their family have bought them a LifeBook package as a gift.

“The split is 60/40,” says Moëd. “It’s usually the authors themselves [who contact us]. Many of our customers are in their 80s or 90s — with the oldest being 105 — and pay by cheque! But shouldn’t it be the 50-year-old gifting it for their dad or their mum?

“Even though these stories are a precious legacy for the family, it’s not always easy to get one’s parents or grandparents to do it. The authors almost need permission to talk about themselves, but usually understand when they realise that it is for their grandchildren.”

He stresses that what LifeBook does is not vanity publishing — the books produced are not for sale; they are what he calls “a private legacy for the family, and if they don’t tell their stories, no one will”.

Private they may be, but some of the books have a wider resonance. He highlights one called The House That Saved Us, by Peter Briess, a child refugee from the then Czechoslovakia.

The author tells how his family escaped the Holocaust after a Nazi commandant offered them exit visas in exchange for the keys to their home. Briess had 100 paperbacks made, which he distributed to Holocaust museums.

Moëd urges families to act quickly to preserve such memories. “I get angry when people don’t get on and do it and they do lose these [stories]. I had one customer who had a 107-year-old aunt and he wanted to think about it.”

A sense of mortality provided a strong motivation for one author. Peter Barfoot, a farmer and food producer, wrote his memoir while recovering from a life-threatening polo accident. The process of working on his book, Farmin’, “has become possibly the biggest factor in my rehabilitation. It got my brain going again,” he says.

Since LifeBook was founded seven years ago, hundreds of people have been helped to create their autobiographies. Moëd is reluctant to give an exact figure, preferring to say that “over 7,000 people have a LifeBook in their hands”.

From the converted barn that serves as the company HQ, in the grounds of Moëd’s home in Surrey, around 200 projects are being handled at any one time. The 18-strong staff include editors and project managers who look after the interviewers and the writers — there are around 300 of them — wherever they are in the world. “We operate globally out of this barn,” says Moëd.

LifeBook has a presence in 20 countries — books have been published in around 10 languages. The business is set to grow with a planned launch in the United States.

In his living-room-cum-office, there are bookshelves containing all the works LifeBook has published. Some have the kind of titles you’d expect— In My Own Words, A Fortunate Life, My Life So Far. Others are more intriguing: All My Sins Remembered, Yes Matron, Looking Back in Embarrassment (Moëd’s favourite title).

And sitting on the shelves is Life is For Sharing, the book that resulted from Jules’s reminiscences. It was the first one LifeBook published.

So, has Moëd created his own LifeBook? After all, he has a story to tell — emigrating to the UK as a child, getting and losing 29 jobs in six years before finding his niche in airline catering, marriage to Yvette at West London Synagogue, and finally setting up LifeBook, which he describes as his “passion”.

“I’m starting it next month,” he says. “I’m really looking forward to being interviewed.”