The Voice in Your Head
On narrating my audiobook
Before I jump into my post, I want to share that writers on Substack have come together to fundraise for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. I’m late to this. All the same, as Israel continues its savage bombardment of Gaza using US weapons, the need is as great as ever. I don’t ask for subscribers of this Substack to pay (if you receive messages asking for money, they’re automatically generated!). But some of you have been kind enough to pledge money anyway—which is moving to me. If you’re still able, please send that money to PCRF instead. Thank you so much for reading!
My brother thought it was comical when I came home, after my first day narrating the audiobook of Group Living and Other Recipes, and announced that it had been unbelievably, maddeningly, humiliatingly difficult. Nervous sweat had soaked into my dress, the cold, stinky kind that only secretes when you feel anxiety.
“Did you think it was going to be easy?” he said with a chuckle. But his teasing is always based in love, and he comforted me: It’s okay if it feels hard because it is hard! He insisted that it would get smoother as I became more experienced.
On days two and three, I doubted him. I sat in the closet-sized booth of the Rye Room, a recording studio off Macadam Boulevard, and continued to sweat and stumble over my words. I didn’t know that sometimes when I say the letter p to start a word, a burst of air erupts out of my mouth (known as a plosive). I didn’t know that I say the word beloved the same way when it’s a noun or an adjective, when apparently one is be’LUH-vid and the other is be’luv’d. (You guess which!). I didn’t know that I mispronounce mischievous, wizened, and mycelium (I should know those!). I didn’t know that between words, sometimes my mouth just verbalizes sounds like a baby searching for meaning.
I was alone in the carpeted booth before a remarkably shiny mic. But I was not alone. Behind two doors, at the helm of the recording equipment, sat Emma Caudill, a very young and energetic recording engineer, wearing punk-rock clothes and occasionally snacking on her leftover pasta. She was always encouraging and patient, even when I needed to repeat the same sentence over and over again. After I read the words, “He was a Pussy Cat with an eighteen-inch-long anatomical fabric vulva running the length of his torso, sewn onto his furry onesie,” she erupted in happy delight. Her presence was wonderful.
Also in my ears, piped all the way from San Diego, was Rhett Samuel Price, my director and an audiobook narrator himself, who specializes in sci-fi and black history. Rhett listened attentively for the full nearly 40 hours we spent recording my book. Rhett tried to coax the best performance out of me that he could. In one especially memorable moment, he conjured the memorial at Pearl Harbor, when a voice (or voices) pumped from speakers reads the names of all of the people who died in the attack, starting at a whisper and slowly gaining in volume. He asked me to attempt something similar for a particularly difficult passage, and it felt so right.
Rhett noticed the smallest errors—all of the mispronunciations, all of those swallowed conjunctive words as I raced to the next sentence—because in audiobooks, the goal is fidelity to the text. I had to be true to my own work. Never had it felt so outside of me.
When I slumped, Rhett would give me advice he’d learned directly from… and he did make me guess… Morgan Freeman! Drink water so hot you can barely swallow. Open your mouth and yawn so wide the corners of your mouth almost crack! I learned about Vocal Zone, a very effective lozenge that’s so menthol-y it burns. Rhett and Emma had to listen to my stomach growl before lunch, my fabric rub as I crossed my legs, even an occasional burp. My voice was in their heads, dominating every moment of our sessions. And it was inside of my head, like a detached, unfamiliar creature, nervously asking for approval. I would open my mouth and with wonder equal to theirs, wait to discover what would emerge.
Both before and during the audiobook recording sessions, I questioned: Why did I want to read my own book? Isn’t that egotistical? But I knew the answer: Because it’s my story and my life; because I want to experience something new; because I love to read aloud; because I’m curious how it will feel to encounter my book in this totally new way.
And for all of those reasons, by the end of day five, and then, a month later, after a session of pick-ups,1 I was glad that I’d challenged myself, and that my publisher, Spiegel and Grau, had supported my decision. Zak was right. It had gotten easier. I was less smelly and more confident. I also felt a level of respect for audiobook narrators that will never fade and a well of gratitude for all of the people who made my audiobook happen. My name will be the only one listed on both the book and the audiobook, but what a lie that is!
Audiobooks remind me of long drives with my mom as we listened to Walter Mosley mysteries, me pulling each tape from the puffy plastic case that housed them. They help me conjure my grandma Alice, letting me choose a novel from a wooden rocking baby bassinet she’d repurposed into a child’s book bin and then reading Heidi or Gwinna to me, perhaps wishing I’d fall asleep but instead going on and on as I asked for more.
If you’re a Spotify user, I’d be honored if you’d pre-save the audiobook of Group Living and Other Recipes! (If it gives you an error message, please try updating your app!) And on August 6, when the book and audiobook are released, I’d be flabbergasted and amazed if you’d listen! Having my voice and my story inside other people’s heads and ears (your head? your ears?) feels intimate and vulnerable to me. To my surprise, it also feels incredibly touching.
I was surprised to learn that two people known as QCs (quality control) listened to the whole audiobook while reading my book, checking for inconsistencies. Separately, Spotify fed the audio into an AI reader to do the same!