Thank You for Listening(109)

I would also caution: Just as My Oxford Year was not my Oxford year, nor anyone else’s for that matter, this glimpse into audiobooks is not the whole picture; it’s not even a view from “the narrator’s perspective.” It is one narrator’s perspective, filtered through the self-selective and self-serving lens of fiction.

In truth, the most autobiographical part of the novel is also the most universal. Like so many others, I had a beloved grandparent who suffered from dementia. By far, the most real-life moment in the whole book is when BlahBlah tells Sewanee what it feels like to lose her bearings in reality. I was gifted that exchange from my grandfather, after he called me at 4 A.M. from his room in an assisted living facility telling me he was at a conference at the beach waiting for my father (who’d been dead for three years) to pick him up. Six hours later, he was clearheaded enough to tell me what I’ve now told you (though I changed the particular examples to better suit Blah’s backstory).

But I am not Sewanee. She is not me. Because, while the biographies might look similar, there’s one major alteration (besides a missing eye), which, to quote Frost, “made all the difference.”

When we speak of autobiography—or, really, autofiction—it seems to me there’s more nuance in the concept than we acknowledge. After all, what defines a person? Is it what happens to them? Or is it who they are? Writers are encouraged to “write what you know,” but “what you know” can mean anything. A profession, sure. A character, of course. A setting, obviously. But it can also just mean . . . an emotion. A feeling. A conviction.

The idea of writing a rom-com set in the Romance audiobook world came to me ten years ago, when I was knee-deep in the Romance audiobook world. It came when I was doing a dual narration with a narrator who’s like a little brother to me, and the e-mails we were sending back and forth, the phone calls—are you adding moans to the sex scenes? Just how growly are you making his voice?—were, objectively, hilarious.

It’s a weird job. There’s no way around it. And it seemed like perfect fodder for something.

But what?

Over the years, this story lived as a screenplay. It lived, in my head, for a time, as a staged one-woman show. When I first began conceiving of it as a book, I thought Nick might be an author, writing under the June French pen name, who falls in love with his audiobook narrator, who, of course, doesn’t know his true identity. That would have worked. But as audiobooks, and by extension narrators, became more popular, I witnessed the fandom that grew up around Romance audio’s biggest male stars and I knew I wanted to write about that.

In the summer of 2017, when I’d turned in the final draft of My Oxford Year and people were asking what I was working on next, this idea was leading the pack, but I had two problems. I didn’t know if people cared enough about audiobooks to care about this book and I didn’t know who my main character was.

Then audiobooks exploded in popularity and I felt confident that most people had at least heard of audiobooks, even if they’d never before thought about the narrators behind them.

But my main character was still a question.

I was, frankly, intimidated by that question. Because I knew, whoever I wrote, people would assume she was me.

So how would I differentiate her?

To start, I asked myself why she was narrating. If she were happy narrating, as I was, if she loved her life, as I did, where would the conflict come from? Many (probably most) narrators are actors, so maybe she was just biding her time, waiting for the next on-camera or theater gig? But that felt unsatisfactory. I wanted to give the professional, working-class, yeoman narrator their due. It’s a job—a skill, a craft—in its own right, and it doesn’t get enough attention as it is.

And then, MeToo happened.

I didn’t want to write a MeToo book; this isn’t a MeToo book, don’t worry, you didn’t miss something. But at the end of 2017, the entertainment industry that I had grown up in was rocked by scandal. Everything we’d always whispered was finally being shouted and it seemed—shockingly—that people might actually be held accountable. An outcome that, truthfully, had never occurred to me as a possibility. It was a time of reflection for me, and the realization that had me walking around for most of the winter of 2017-18 as one big ball of rage was how little control the business of acting affords and how that opens the door to predation. As an actor, you can’t control when you work or with whom or in which role. You can’t control when the opportunity arises or how it’s handled in the execution. There’s a pretty famous saying: sometimes the only power an actor has is saying no.

But who ever says no? To the potential money? Fame? Relevance? To the joy and satisfaction of getting to do what you love?

Well. I did. I decided around that time that I didn’t want to act on the business’s terms anymore. That any fun and fulfillment it might possibly bring wasn’t worth the frustrations and dehumanization it reliably brought. I suppose it’s like getting to that breaking point, finally, with that one boyfriend who just won’t go away. Every time he leaves, and you think you’re over him, he comes back with new excuses, new promises, and you say, okay, well at least he’s talking to his mother again or he has a job this time or maybe he finally sees my worth. How many times do you let him come back? In the wake of 2017, I’d reached my limit. My life was so much better without Hollywood in it.