When Lord Karan Bilimoria, a crossbench member of the House of Lords, former chancellor of the University of Birmingham and founder of Cobra Beer, set out to capture his mother’s story, he began with a hurdle that many families will recognise: she wasn’t convinced there was anything remarkable enough to put between two covers.
What followed, though, was a demonstration of exactly why LifeBook projects matter. As conversations with her interviewer unfolded, Yasmin’s confidence grew and the process became something that she genuinely looked forward to – thoughtful, collaborative and full of unexpected detail. With her input shaping everything from the edits to the photographs, Yasmin’s book became a shared family endeavour and, ultimately, a bound volume that she can hold, enjoy and pass on. And, as so often happens, the making of a LifeBook didn’t just preserve memories – it brought new ones to the surface, including stories that Lord Bilimoria himself had never heard before.
At Mansion House, in London, Lord Bilimoria spoke with LifeBook Memoirs co-founder Roy Moëd about his mother’s experience of creating her private autobiography: what it meant to record her life in her own words, how the project differed from a more formal account of his father’s life written years before and why the care and quality of the final book mattered so much to the Bilimoria family.
Yasmin’s LifeBook, entitled All My Days, was completed in 2024.
