Reading My Audiobook Was an Act of Letting Go

You cannot grow, or heal, or whatever it is we’re trying to achieve when we write though trauma, by distancing yourself from your own pain.

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

The thing no one tells you about writing your first book is that the hardest part isn’t the writing, but everything that comes after. Writing a book doesn’t end when you turn in that final draft, nor does it end when you finally get to hold a finished copy in your hands. You have written a book, a thing from your mind that now exists in the world, but before it’s really complete you must first be ready to let it go.

Recording the audiobook for my first collection of essays, Carefree Black Girls, was an act of letting go—of the person I was when I wrote the book, but also of the person I thought I would be once it was released. Perhaps that is why I felt such complete and utter dread at the prospect of reading my own words back to myself. The thing is, while the book is ostensibly “a celebration of Black women in pop culture,” it was written during one of the worst depressive episodes of my life. And so, amidst the pop-culture analysis and gushing over figures like Josephine Baker and Lizzo, the essays are also imbued with an unflinching, even uncomfortable sense of my addled mind. I was terrified before the recording session, because I knew that I was about to become reacquainted with a version of myself that I despised. Reading the essays out loud felt so final, so irreversible; confirmation that soon strangers would become privy to my shadows. Writing the book was one thing, but recording the audiobook was the point of no return—after that was done, there was no changing whatever was on the page. 

It took me three years to finish writing Carefree Black Girls, and three days to record it. On the first day, I sat in a tiny booth at the Macmillan Audio offices in Manhattan, in front of a looming black microphone and a glowing tablet that displayed my words in large print. Save for the tablet, the room was completely dark—I’d asked for the lights to be turned off so that I wouldn’t feel overstimulated, or have to catch glimpses of myself in the glare of the glass separating me from the audio producer in the adjoining room.

And then I began to read, quickly, as if I were in a race with myself to get to the end. In doing so, I kept flubbing lines and having to restart whole sentences, my frustration increasing with each take. “Slow down,” the producer said, “And maybe take a sip of water. We’re getting some mouth sounds.” I began again, reading a passage in which I discussed my severe depression, how I felt “as though I were in a never-ending emotional spiral, a constant falling.”

“Can you read that again?” the producer asked. “We just got a little bit of a tummy rumble.”

This was how much of the experience went: balancing the logistics of reading in a way that didn’t sound absolutely terrible with the emotional toll of reading my thoughts on colorism, fatphobia and police brutality, mixed in with musings about my own anxiety and depression. At the end of the seven-hour session I murmured to myself, “Jesus, this is bleak.” The fact that I could feel how sad I was when I was writing the book felt so exposing.

Writing the book was one thing, but recording the audiobook was the point of no return.

On the second day, I arrived at the office around 11 a.m. in a long, poofy green dress that I had worn to a private dinner the evening prior. A dinner where I’d drunk too many different kinds of cocktails and, by 3 a.m., was projectile vomiting into my toilet. My partner sent me off in an Uber with a huge jug full of water and Pedialyte, which I took swigs of throughout the recording session to try and regain some equilibrium. Before we began to record, the producer asked to take a few pictures of me for social media. I noticed my wig was askew.

My summation of the first day had been, “Jesus, this is bleak.” On the second day, by the time I read the final line in the final chapter, I thought, “Jesus, this is me.” Writing has a way of revealing things to you in stages, I find. When I finished writing the book, I mostly felt relief. Now, having completed an entire reading of it, what I felt was exposed. I had hoped that by writing candidly about my pain, I could heal it. And I thought healing would mean feeling no connection to the words I read out loud. I thought healing would mean being able to say, “And she lived happily ever after, and she let go of the sadness, and she truly became carefree.” I wanted, so badly, to not be the person I was when I wrote the book.

But in my hungover haze, wearing yesterday’s stained dress with my wig cocked to the side, I resigned myself to the fact that growth has no end. And you cannot grow, or heal, or whatever it is we’re trying to achieve when we write though trauma, by distancing yourself from your own pain. I had to read my own words back to myself to understand that. I had to reconcile the fact that this was, indeed, me on the page. By reading the words, I was taking true ownership of all the joy and sadness that makes me who I am.

On the third and final day, I entered the recording booth to do pickups for a handful of lines that I had messed up. I felt, somehow, different. I still flubbed sentences, still cringed at certain lines, still felt the acute anxiety that comes with sharing your heart so publicly. But I also felt compassion for myself, compassion for the fact that in order to write about joy, I had to write about sadness.

I recently got a chance to hear a snippet of the audiobook. I think I sound weird, anxious, and kind of miserable. But I also think I sound like myself. I’m not sure what else to call that but acceptance.