good voices

I used to make a podcast, lifetimes or less than a decade ago (I would've guessed a decade, it was actually 2015-16), of writers reading their work aloud. Like a reading series, but on a podcast instead of in a bookstore or bar. 2020 would really have been a moment for it. But in 2015, it was small and gave me reason to keep my office clean, and to meet a hundred or so writers I wouldn't have known otherwise. So it's no surprise I'm in a moment of falling in love with listening to writers read their work, but I didn't see it coming. I'm not usually much of an audiobook person, more prone to filling my ears with podcast chatter, pleasant company compared to my own thoughts. Lately, though, I find myself listening to music instead when I drive, wanting to sing or daydream. And when I want to listen to words I want something a little more.

It's partly, I'm sure, the cicada-like emergence of my brain after being underground with my book for so long. Droning my cicada buzz, horny not for other cicadas but for ideas. 

Could I be reading print books? Yes, of course. I have a stack on my phone, stacks on my shelves. But my cicada brain is too easily entranced by pretenders, decoys that promise to be stimulating ideas, but are just twitter and instagram, tricking my brain into thinking it's being stimulated by offering an opportunity to scroll. Maybe if you refresh again?

So I guess it's no surprise that audiobooks are doing it for me, when my eyes are on the road or on what I'm cooking, giving my brain somewhere meatier to be. First Lab Girl, Hope Jahren's hit memoir of a few years ago, the story of her career as a research scientist. And now, just finished on a walk a few minutes ago, Kiese Laymon's Heavy, a memoir, also. Both read by the authors.

They're opposite books in a way, though both memoirs that trace the author's twisting path through academia, that tell a life story and something more. They both will punch you in the gut with the moments when they shift to "you," addressing an audience who is not the reader (or listener) in either case. They're both read by writers who, it's not enough that they're brilliant writers (and in Jahren's case a brilliant scientist, too), they turn out to be brilliant readers of their work. I know these books are great on the page, but in audio they become so much more.

But the ways that they're opposites: Partly it's how I thought of them before I read them. Lab Girl, a hit science memoir, is it that good or just a snowballing bestseller? (It really is that good.) Heavy, a memoir from a writer I've admired for years, ever since hearing him read an essay in a sweltering Williamsburg loft. (I tried to get him on my podcast, but it never worked out.) I've read and taught his essays; his conversation about revision on the Ezra Klein podcast is stunning in its insight and thoughtfulness. And still, as with Lab Girl, I was left awed. At writerly skill, insight, generosity, bravery. And the power of a person's voice. 

Not every writer is a good reader of their own work, and very few are truly great. Jahren and Laymon happen to be. You don't need to be a good or great reader to be a good or great writer. It helps, in publicity, probably a bit, to be enchanting at readings, to move a few more copies. It helps, in writing, to connect your voice and body to your ideas, the out-loud readthrough to polish and perfect. And I'm sure it adds something, in marketing an audiobook, to have a memoir read by the author. But it's also such an extra gift of intimacy, especially in these two books, to hear the voice of the person who lived this story, and decided to share it, to be present with you, This is mine, this is me. And to know how every line should land, to allow the hitch of breath that is true. Now I sound like I'm against acting, I'm not. This is a kind of performance, too. But one that creates closeness. Not to mention its own kind of art.

If you've listened to other audiobooks read by the author that you've loved, I'd love to know them.