The Intimate Relationship of Telling Someone Else’s Story

Nonfiction writers can get so consumed by investigating that we lose track of the story. Narrating my audiobook brought me back to the real person at the heart of it.

This is The Sound of My Voice, a series on the craft, process, and stakes of recording audiobooks.

It’s one of the best-known stories ever: Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden, are told by God not to eat the fruit dangling from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. A serpent tempts Eve to eat the Forbidden Fruit—most commonly pictured as an apple—so as to open her eyes. Both Eve and Adam take a bite and become aware of their nakedness.

Throughout history, in literature and folklore, the apple continues to function as a plot device. From Snow White biting into a poisoned apple to William Tell shooting one off his son’s head and sparking a rebellion; from Alfred Tennyson calling apples “hallowed fruit” to The Da Vinci Code’s code being solved, rather obviously, with Isaac Newton’s A-P-P-L-E of revelation, apples appear at crucial moments—seemingly benign objects that hold a hidden power.

Late last year, I nervously sat down in a small recording studio to narrate the audio version of my new book, Lost in the Valley of Death: A Story of Obsession and Danger in the Himalayas. I had accepted the task, as opposed to having my publisher hire a voice actor, in part because I wanted to see what might arise out of vocalizing something I had so silently worked on for years. Reporting and writing the book had been an exploration of a stranger’s life and disappearance, but the process had become deeply personal and more intimate than I could’ve expected. I had written the book in the hope of transferring some of that intimacy to a reader curled up in a chair, turning pages while being transported to faraway places.

My book’s finished text had long been signed off on, the cover designed, the font chosen, the advance reading copies mailed out to early readers and press. I had no more opportunities to affect how a reader might engage with my words, but I realized I had an opportunity to affect how a listener would move through my book.

Still, sitting down in the small recording studio for the first time, the pressure was hard to suppress. A reader reads with the most trusted voice in their head: their own. But a narrator can get it wrong, come across tonally inappropriate, be too quick or too slow, or simply deflate what could be a powerful moment. To settle my nerves and my throat, I reached for my go-to soothing drink: ginger-lemon-honey tea. What is great for colds is not, I was quickly told, great for speaking and speaking at length. I was sipping a mistake before I had even read a line. Instead, the kind audio engineer advised, bring an apple. It’s a trick that many who work in music or podcasting or voice-overs know well, but it surprised a neophyte like me. The apple’s acidity, she explained, produces saliva to counter dry mouth, removes phlegm, and returns the voice from scratchy to clear.

I had never considered that eating anything while inside a recording studio would be accepted, let alone encouraged, especially with a microphone capable of picking up the faintest brushes of clothing. But the next day, on my walk to the studio, I picked up a green Granny Smith and tucked it into my bag as if it were my first day of school. When I started to narrate, I found myself, after a page or two or three, reaching a familiar obstacle: as I spoke, my mouth would dry out, my throat would begin to develop these subtle clicks, and my voice would start to stretch thin. I could hear the change build through my headphones. Every mouth click began to stick out like a spelling mistake. But then, I would reach for my apple, take a very small bite, and everything would settle. I was shocked by how well it worked.

Most often, when I write, when I have something published, I never dare to read those words again.

A common writer’s trick while drafting is to read your text aloud and find yourself surprised by what you might catch, what a reader might stumble upon. I had done this with certain sections of my book as I wrote it, but I had never read it aloud in its entirety—and never while listening to my voice all too clearly through headphones. Most often, when I write, when I have something published, I never dare to read those words again. I know I will inevitably find sentences or phrases I’ll wish I could change, wish I could’ve written better. Of course, there were moments of reading my book when my word or sentence choices made me stumble, or when I just couldn’t get my tongue around an unintended alliteration only noticeable when read aloud. There were small parts of the book that I had to accept were written in stone and were now being etched into an audio universe as well.

Those apples, in the end, helped shift my focus away from spinning in self-awareness and self-analysis about words I couldn’t change, or how I was narrating, toward what I was narrating. They undoubtedly helped my voice and boosted my confidence, but they also offered moments, however brief, to pause and think about the book itself. In removing the mechanical challenges in my voice, I found myself more able to not only read aloud but also to tell a story.

Ultimately, my book is about someone who disappeared and is presumed dead. It is about a region where dozens of others have disappeared and are presumed dead. It is also about the lengths we go to find meaning in life, to find what makes us truly fulfilled, and to have our eyes opened to the wonderful goods and potential evils of the world.

At times, nonfiction writers can lose track of their story, can become so consumed by the reporting and investigating, the narrative structure, and the reader’s takeaway that we forget we are writing about a person. There was a real person at the heart of my book, and there are real people who care about him not just as a character but as a son, as a friend. My book is about someone who was quite tragically caught in the middle of several confluences: between an old world and a new one, between trying to live truthfully in reality while also trying to express himself honestly online, between a tragic past and an ultimately tragic future. Throughout all my research and reporting and writing, I tried to never lose sight of the fact that at the heart of this story is a person—a complicated, nuanced, layered person who was lost.

The act of narrating my audiobook arrived at the perfect time—when a book moves from a private project to an object being marketed and sold and reviewed—to be reminded of the intimate relationship that is telling someone else’s story. It gave me a moment, a chance before something I cared about so deeply was released to the world, to sit down, one last time, and read. And when I stumbled or my voice strained, or even when I just needed a pause to think about the people behind the pages, I’d reach for the apple, take a small bite, and continue on.