Erica Berry on the Polyamorous Intimacy of Reader, Author, and Audiobook Narrator

I always imagined, that, given the choice, I would read my own audiobook. I had heard memoirs often sounded best in the author’s throat—something about the familiar tang of the hardship unspooled. But had I written a memoir? A bookseller acquaintance asked me that a year before the publication of my debut, and I wasn’t sure what to say. There’s a big strand of me , I said, before explaining there were also strands of history and folklore, of cultural criticism and science. Wolfish was a braid of source material, weaving my life and the path of a wandering wolf while examining of the symbolic and real wolves that surround us both. Thinking about how the book moved between research and self made me question my fantasy of reading it aloud. I had decided to detail some of my most intimate experiences with fear on the page, but I still got nauseous imagining people reading them. Judgement was inevitable. I could not square my desire to write my truth with my desire to be liked. Would these scenes be more palatable if bundled in the cadence of my own emotion, or would my voice create another reason for someone to complain? Her work was about my words, but my words only existed through her. I wish I could say I decided not to read the audiobook because it didn’t interest me, but that would be a lie. I didn’t read because I was afraid. When I told my editor I had decided to take up the publisher’s offer of a professional, I thought I was signing up for a boost of talent. I hadn’t realized that inviting someone to crawl into my sentences would change my relationship with my past, my words, and—somewhere along the way—deliver a friend. * The first time I heard Lessa Lamb’s voice, it was in a line-up of auditions sent to me by the Macmillan audio team. The one I initially gravitated toward was calm and low in pitch, but everyone I played it for disagreed. The older voice isn’t quite right, a friend […]

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