Finding Your Audiobook Voice

The door closed with a whoosh like a vacuum seal. The seal sucked up all of the sound. It left behind only air—hot, still air that made the back of my neck liquefy.

The Booth was a coffin, upright and fitted on two sides with glass, and I was being punished—sealed in alive—for daring to talk about my family. For saying, out loud to the universe, This is how it was or, rather, This is how it was to me.

I had appeared on a Tuesday morning at the Flatiron building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third street in New York City, where over four days I was expected to record the audio version of The Mighty Franks, my memoir of coming of age in a bizarrely intertwined family in which brother and sister (my father and my aunt) had married sister and brother (my mother and my uncle) and the widowed mothers of these sets of siblings (my two grandmothers) lived together for twelve unhappy years.

The book, like the early part of my life that it describes, ends up being dominated by the baroque, unstable