Audio, Audio!

categories: Cocktail Hour

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Nina, my wife, didn’t read my last book, All the Wild That Remains. She listened to it as an audio book instead. That means she got to hear a strange man say things like this about my then-eight year old daughter: “I got in the car with Hadley and drove seven hours up to Wyoming…..”

I liked the narration for the book a lot but the narrator’s voice was distinctly unlike mine. It had a hint of Englishness to it, not effete exactly but slightly fancy, and the word “bullshit” did sound right when he said it.

When I told a friend of ours, Bekki Lee, about Nina listening to the not-me narrator, her story-making mind came up with this: what if a wife listened to a husband’s book and fell in love with the narrator’s voice, then left the husband for him?

That can’t happen this time since I will be reading my own book. I’ll be very happy to have narrated Ultimate Glory myself, and to have it. But I was surprised by how brutal a process the recording has been. Six days of 6 hour days of reading. Who knew I had so much saliva in my mouth or then, the next minute, so little? Who knew the letter L makes a clicking sound? Who knew I couldn’t pronounce half the words I thought I knew in my head?

Barring any unforeseen circumstances, that will be the last time in my life where I read anything out loud for six hours.

For the next book I’ll just let my wife’s lover do it.

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You can hear all my thoughts on the recording sessions at Penguin-Random House’s “This is the Author.”