The conversations that matter most are often the ones we keep putting off
A series of practical handbooks for adult children and their ageing parents, written by someone who knows both sides of the table
Some books help you escape
These help you stay present
Richard Lyon has spent more than 50 years as a journalist, editor, writer and professional communicator. He has interviewed authors, politicians and sports stars, reported from crime scenes to court rooms, edited national publications and written across every format imaginable. Now, at 81, he is writing the most personal work of his career.
The series “The Conversations They Won’t Have” is built on a simple but uncomfortable truth. That almost all families that have ageing parents avoid the very conversations they most need to have. Not out of cruelty or indifference, but because no one quite knows how to begin, and the right moment never seems to arrive.
These handbooks are for adult children who love their parents and want to do right by them, but find themselves at a loss when it comes to talking about the future. About health. About money. About wishes. About what comes next.
Richard writes not as a distant expert, but as someone who has lived through these questions himself.
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The Conversations They Won't Have
Practical, down-to-earth advice on how to have the conversations families need to have
Why Your Parents Won’t Talk
Book 1
A guide to the problems surrounding this vitally important conversation
What you say and what your parent hears may be two completely different things. This short guide explains why this is and how to manage the conversation beneath the conversation.
Available on Amazon as an e-book.
Shutting You Down
Book 2
The five different methods parents use to halt the conversation
Meet the five types of parental obstructionist: The Protector, The Controller, The Avoider, The Deflector, The Pragmatist. You will recognize at least one of them.
Available on Amazon as an e-book.
Say It So They Hear It
Book 3
The words you use change everything
In Say It So They Hear It, communication specialist Richard Lyon turns from the psychology of resistance to the mechanics of language itself, and makes a case that will change the way you think about every difficult conversation you have ever had.
Available on Amazon as an e-book.
The Sentences That Open Doors
Book 4
What to say, word for word
The Sentences That Open Doors is the most practical book in The Conversations They Won’t Have series. It addresses the specific conversations that families find hardest — driving, finances, wills, care arrangements, medical wishes, memory concerns — and provides the kind of real-world language that works in real families. Not scripts to be memorised. Patterns that can be adapted, adjusted, and made genuinely your own.
Available on Amazon as an e-book.
When It Turns Into An Argument
Book 5
Staying close when conversations become hard
You prepared carefully. You chose your words. You picked what seemed like a reasonable moment. And within minutes, it was an argument.
Not a discussion. Not even a difficult exchange. An argument — with raised voices, old grievances resurfacing, things said that will need to be apologised for, and the familiar, demoralising sensation of having made everything worse rather than better.
This is the book for that moment.
Available on Amazon as an e-book.
The Last Difficult Thing
Book 6
Staying human through ageing, decline and loss
There comes a point, in most families, when the practical strategies begin to matter less.
The conversations about driving and care and finances are still there. But something has shifted. The resistance that made those conversations so difficult has, in many families, quietly spent itself. What remains, underneath all the difficulty, underneath all the avoidance, underneath all the arguments and the misunderstandings and the things that were left too long unsaid, is something simpler and more human than any of it.
Two people. Finite time. Everything still left to say.