Every night for the past eight years, sometime between 8:30 and 10 p.m., my child has had the comforting voices of myself or his father lull him to sleep with a great story.
I need that comfort, too, and I get it from my beloved audiobook narrators. They bring fiction to life, stories floating in my reverie as my consciousness slips into dreaming. When the lights are out and my eyes are closed, my imagination awakens and erases the stressors of the day. It’s just me, the author and the voice. Great narrators immerse you completely in a book, making you forget that anything matters besides the characters and the plot.
Recently I found myself listening to Julia Whelan’s Thank You for Listening, a novel in which an audiobook narrator meets her equal in a bar. They both don dramatized personas and accents, thinking they’ll never see each other again. Whelan herself is an audiobook narrator and performed each voice in the story, and despite knowing that Whelan voiced both the man and woman in the scene, my mind saw the table, the drinks, and the couple each as living elements in the bar. I was lost in their world — and loving it.
Julia Whelan is one of my favorite audiobook narrators. In 2020, AudioFile magazine crowned Whelan with their Golden Voice Award, a lifetime achievement for the field. She’s narrated over 500 audiobooks; chances are, if you listened to books by Emily Henry, Kristin Hannah or Taylor Jenkins Reed, you’ve heard her. Her 2019 performance of Tara Westover’s Educated landed her an Audie for Best Female Narrator.
Hosted by the Audio Publishers Association, the Audies are the Oscars for audiobook narrators. The 2024 Audie Gala takes place March 4 at the Avalon Hotel in Hollywood, California. Last year’s Audie for Audiobook of the Year went to Viola Davis for her self-narrated memoir, Finding Me. That audiobook also won her a Grammy, pushing her to EGOT status (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony). Yes! Narrators can win Grammys!
Many actors-cum-authors choose to read their own memoirs — last year’s highlights include Patrick Stewart’s Making It So, Barbra Streisand’s My Name is Barbra, and Leslie Jones’s Leslie F*cking Jones. Other authors have found success drafting Oscar winners as their narrators. For this year’s Audies, I predict Audiobook of the Year will go to Michelle Williams for reading Britney Spears’s memoir The Woman in Me, or to Meryl Streep for Anne Patchett’s Tom Lake.
I cannot write a love letter to audiobooks without mentioning industry heavy hitters. Scott Brick, the 2004 Golden Voice winner, has performed more than 900 audiobooks for so many bestsellers and well-known authors. Audiobook publishers have also hired him to enliven modern classics like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.
Join me in celebrating these voices. Indulge in these performances by checking out an audiobook today through the Libby app.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s February 2024 issue.
