The Best Gift I Ever Gave My Dad Is Something My Family Will Treasure for Generations
By Katie Quinn
Katie Quinn leads the video team. She’s hosted videos about Wirecutter's testing of cheap sunglasses, pizza ovens, and more.
Dads are notoriously tough to shop for. But my dad is usually a breeze.
Still, there’s one gift I’ve given him that stands above the rest: a subscription service that helped him write a book.
At age 68, my dad has a slew of interests that have long made it easy for my brother and me to find gift-giving inspiration. He loves theater and live music, so we got him tickets to Merrily We Roll Along and Lake Street Dive. He’s an American-history buff, so we’ve given him biographies of John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
My dad has also always wanted to write a book. But what do you give the aspirational author in your life?
It’s not like seeing his name in print was new to my dad. He worked for decades as an eye doctor, and as one of the country’s leading experts on contact lenses, he wrote many well-read medical articles.
In retirement, he took a writing workshop. And I could tell he was itching to find new outlets for his writing. So when my husband told me about Storyworth, a service that prompts you to share personal stories and compiles them into a hardcover book, I saw a perfect fit for my dad.
Watching my dad’s book come together filled me with the kind of joy that’s usually reserved for a parent witnessing their child take the stage for the first time. And it’s a gift that helped him achieve a true dream: writing a book.
This gift-worthy subscription service sends weekly prompts to the recipient so that they can write their own stories, which are then compiled along with personal photos or art into a hardcover book.
Buying Options
A yearlong Storyworth subscription includes weekly writing prompts sent to the gift recipient via email. They can be automated, randomly selected prompts from Storyworth, or the gift-giver can create or edit the questions for further personalization.
Wirecutter hasn’t done robust testing to compare Storyworth with other, similar subscription services. But several Wirecutter journalists have tried Storyworth over the years, and they agree that it can be a great gift.
Storyworth isn’t for everyone. But for a detail-oriented, inbox-zero personality who loves to-do tasks (hi, Dad!), it’s great.
“Not everyone likes writing, and not everyone has a knack for it,” says senior staff writer Rose Maura Lorre, who gave Storyworth subscriptions to several members of her family when her child was born.
Some answers she received were lackluster and short, and after a couple of months, a few relatives stopped responding to the writing prompts entirely. “You’re basically assigning weekly homework to your relatives for the promise of a future reward (i.e. an actual paper book), and that’s a hard sell in some cases.”
Another potential downside: You might hear stories that make you uncomfortable. One of my colleagues shared with me that her grandmother told her stories from her own childhood that she found upsetting.
But I absolutely loved curating my own questions for my dad, which were often riffs on Storyworth’s prompts but were always geared toward answering questions that I had long been curious about. What was his mother like when he was a child? (Harried but always finding the humor in things.) How did he get his first job? (He worked as a paperboy—and to this day, he’s amazingly punctual.) How does he want to be remembered? (As someone who tried to see the complex humanity and inherent value in everyone and tried to connect, even if just in some small way.)
This exercise really brought us closer together—and that’s saying something, since we were already quite close.
“My favorite questions to respond to were the ones you asked, Katie,” he told me after he had written over 30 stories. “They tend to be more personal and relevant to me and our relationship.” He also wrote himself specific prompts to tell a particular story from his life that he was moved to share.
I learned so many things about my dad’s past that I’d never heard before. He wrote about a legendary family road trip in which he and his siblings piled in the back of the car to drive from Ohio to Kansas—a journey that birthed inside jokes that still bring the laughs some 60 years later—and revealed the origins of the guitar I’ve watched him strum my entire life.
My dad told me that as he was writing, he often thought about my daughter, Serafina, who is 2 years old. “I imagined her in the future wondering ‘Who was my Pop? What did he think? What made him tick?’”
Every week my dad received a prompt to write and added to his story. Submitting his writing was beyond simple—just paste into an entry field and press a button. At the end of the year, all of his writings were compiled into a hardcover book.
You or your gift recipient can edit the book—adding photos, tweaking headlines, choosing the cover design you prefer—before it goes off to print. And making these edits is easy, not just for a multimedia professional like me, but for my retired dad too.
My dad and I worked to track down old photos that would bring his stories to life. We unearthed images of him that I’d never seen before: as an 8-year-old in front of his childhood home in Ohio, for example, or at community-theater rehearsals from the ’90s, where he played the Tin Man, Captain von Trapp, Harold Hill, and more.
For the first few, we scanned and uploaded the pics together, sitting on the couch with my laptop. But he quickly got the hang of the site’s intuitive interface and uploaded everything else without my help. “The photo uploads were very easy once I figured out that in order to see the option to upload photos you have to be in the edit mode,” he said.
One subscription gets you one hardcover book, but you can have more copies printed for an additional cost from $39 to $99, depending on the number of pages and color versus black-and-white.
Before we reached the end of his Storyworth year, my dad told me, “I think I’ve written everything I have to say about my life!”
And so we wrapped up his book a couple of months before the annual conclusion to the subscription rolled around. Better to end early and on top rather than to soldier on for excessive seasons like Grey’s Anatomy, we decided.
Now, there are a couple of things about Storyworth that annoyed us.
Saving a story for the first time automatically sends a copy to interested parties, which is fine, but edited versions of the same story are not re-sent, though they are saved on the site, and your final version is what ends up in the book.
This bothered my dad (ever the editor!), who would revisit and rewrite stories multiple times before he was ready to share the results with the other members of the family who opted to receive his weekly writings.
I personally loved getting the weekly responses in my inbox and not having to wait for the finished product to soak in his stories. To me, the process was an ideal blend of digital, immediate gratification and lasting physical memories.
And overall, the experience was great.
For my dad—an always-occupied retiree involved in an unbelievable number of clubs, volunteer activities, and hobbies—Storyworth provided motivation to slow down and reflect. It gave him a reason to write. And the whole family, including future generations, will benefit from it, one story at a time.
This article was edited by Catherine Kast and Ben Frumin.
Meet your guide
Katie Quinn leads the video team at Wirecutter. She has authored two books (Cheese, Wine, and Bread–published in 2021 with HarperCollins–and Avocados—published in 2017 with Short Stack Editions) and has worked at NBC News and NowThis. For many years she ran her own successful YouTube channel and production company.