Growing up, I lived in an auditory household. Ours was a home with layered voices. The reasons are multiple: We were a large, demonstrative family, with five children and two parents; add to that the myriad friends, neighbors, and cousins dropping by, and that’s a lot of people conversating, as they say, a lot of the time. And because I was a child in Detroit during the 1960s -- Motown’s heyday -- Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder and The Temptations provided the soundtrack to my life. I actually believed those artists were singing to me. Also, my mother was running Numbers, which meant she stayed on the phone. When I’d hear my mom repeating her customers’ bets, to me her voice sounded reassuring and hypnotic, like a daytime lullaby.
As a child, the sound of voices was my love language.
But sometimes those voices were yelling and cursing, because there were a lot of different personalities up in our house, and a lot was going on.
In all that cacophony, no one was reading bedtime stories to me at night. But I did have, gifted by my father, a small collection of recorded fairy tales on LPs. My favorite was Peter and the Wolf, narrated by Captain Kangaroo, who was accompanied by a whole symphony orchestra. I loved lying in bed listening to that engrossing story as the vinyl made its revolutions around my red, portable record player. That was the best sound to fall asleep to.
As I grew up, I left behind those recorded fairy tales, long-ago lost the albums themselves. I was an adult before audiobooks became a thing. By then, a writer myself, I never listened to books-on-tape as we used to call them, because I was trying to hone my craft, and it was vital that I study the way other writers’ words landed on the page. When my sister Rita’s lupus began to affect her vision, I did appreciate that she could listen to audiobooks, but I stayed away from them for many years.
Yet, my love of having a story told to me never went away. This is why I became a writer, honestly, because my mother and my sister Rita were both such great storytellers, and I wanted to write stories the way they told them. And as a young professor, I found any excuse to have students read passages of texts out loud, to me. In the early years of our marriage, my husband would read passages of The Diary of Anaïs Nin to me, a sensuous pleasure.
But it was after I had children and began reading bedtime stories to them that my own childhood love of listening to those fairy tales came rushing back. Seeing their faces rapt with attention and anticipation or lax with ease and contentment, all from the sound of my voice, made my heart sing.
Fast-forward, and after having written two novels, I was finally given the opportunity to record the audiobook of my first memoir. I loved the experience. And I really liked every time someone approached me and said, “I listened to your book, and I loved having your voice in my ear.”
What could be more intimate? I still sometimes listen to Toni Morrison narrating Beloved as much for the joy of hearing her mesmerizing voice as for the story.
I feel lucky that Morrison’s voice is available to us in that way, because audiobook recording is hard work. As the writer Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah described in her profile of Toni Morrison for the New York Times Magazine, after she’d observed Morrison narrate her final novel: “It takes a long time to record a book…Some people can’t do it, can’t sit in that dimly lit sarcophagus-like space and read. Many authors use actors. But that’s not how Morrison hears her own sentences, so she does these tedious sessions herself.”
I’m now in the throes of narrating my second memoir, LOVE, RITA, and it requires me to show up to the studio six consecutive days, to record for seven hours a day. It’s demanding. Also, it’s emotionally taxing. Author Bernice McFadden, whose memoir, FirstBorn Girls, comes out soon, chose not to record her own book. “I just didn’t feel like I had the mental or emotional bandwidth,” she said on FB.
I get it. But I love doing it, just the same. I’ve been told I have a soothing voice, and that makes me feel as though I’m sharing a gift, that all listeners out there who, like me, enjoy being read to can come upon my voice and be soothed by it. Comforted.
Don’t we all need the sounds of comfort in our ears right now?
Share this post