Your Next Best Book

One of the great delights about book signings is talking to fellow readers. Sounds simple enough, but with the right crowd and in the right atmosphere, it can take unexpected turns. So it was that I found myself one early April evening in rural Alabama, half an hour from home in the oasis of a public library. This was a return engagement, having spoken there two years before. Now with the release of Control Group, I jumped at the invitation to return. The pleasantries and prepared remarks were familiar enough. Afterward, though, we sat around plates of homemade pimento cheese sandwiches liberated from their crusts and talked about our favorite books. We listed our favorite authors. Neil Diamond’s book came up. So did the Lee Childs series. Someone asked me to recommend their “next best book”. The question didn’t catch me off guard. I’ve had a steady intake of two-dozen books a year for almost a decade. There are plenty of to choose from. I’ve also encountered amazing books over the last year: beautifully crafted, lyrically written, creatively executed, and downright entertaining. I’ve also read some real duds, but why dwell on those. Nobody likes a hater. Here is my own “Top 10” Reading list over the last year, listed in no particular order and summarized at a glance:   Fiction: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid : a contemporary novel about refugees and migration from the war-torn middle east as seen through the eyes of young lovers. Setting Free the Kites by Alex George : a coming-of-age novel about two teenaged boys growing up in small town Maine. Painted against a backdrop of pain and loss, this book sings. Commonwealth by Anne Patchett : an epic tale of the impact on two families lives after an affair at a christening. Patchett could’ve been a therapist with her insight and ability to parse out emotions and serve them up to make readers blush with recognition. Before the Fall by Noah Hawley : a tale of loss and redemption after a plane crash, told in revere chronologic order. How can you know the ending 5 pages in and stay up late to find out how it all happened? Hawley is a master at suspense. The Whites by Richard Price : hard-boiled detective novel, with a twist. Trust no one. The Swans of Fifth Avenue by Melanie Benjamin : a delightfully gossipy novel looking at...
read more

Out of the Closet

In her 1965 award winning performance of The Sound of Music, Julie Andrews crooned to the Von Trapp children, “Let’s start at the very beginning.” Indeed, that’s a very good place to start if you’re singing a Rodgers and Hammerstein song. Or writing a novel. But what if you’re a first-time narrator, steering through the auditory straits of a sound booth? For me, Chapter 13 seemed a very good place to start. The extent of my acting career began and ended in high school. A supporting role in Carousel and then Guys & Dolls, followed by a part in the play My Three Angels, taught me how to lose my inhibitions in front of a crowd. By the time I graduated, though, my acting days had ended. Once I decided to narrate Control Group and completed my narration courses, I had to decide the best way to execute the task. I started with three immutable facts: I am not a trained voice talent. What I love most about reading aloud is creating characters. I had 42 characters that needed a voice. Where to begin? I soon realized that like any production, certain characters would take center stage. They would need fully realized voices and personalities. Mackie, of course, is the protagonist, and his voice—in my head and in my ear—was always going to be my own, even if his actions were not. Red Pescatelli, the antagonist, sounded like the Muppet’s “Rowlf the Dog” on a bad day: a little bit deeper, a little more gravely, and a lot more manipulative. Forty voices to go. My southern soul is steeped in the sweet sounds of an Alabama drawl, so I could tweak my mom’s accent or raise the pitch of voices I heard around town and call forth the words of Donnie and Loretta Sims, the Sheriff, and Earl, the night security guard. While I’m sure the dialect denizens would bust me on my west Texas interpretation of Douglas Schofield, I had so much fun playing the big man from BioloGen that his words rolled off my tongue. Several characters simply had to be different from the others in the scene. When Meredith and her sister, Frances, are talking over the oxygen tubing in the labor and delivery ward, one voice came out bright while the other sounded weary. No one would mistake me for a female, but their motivations...
read more

An Author’s Voice

What does it mean when teachers of writing talk about an author’s voice? Is it style? Word choice? Pacing or prose? And is that something that an author can easily define, or is it best defined by more objective readers? In the summer of 2005, with a stack of pages that comprised the first draft of Control Group, I flew across the country to the Santa Barbara Writer’s conference to find out. One voice I heard while there was that of Ron McLarty. Dubbed by Stephen King as “the best book you can’t read,” McLarty’s debut novel, The Memory of Running, reached its first audience not in print form but as an audiobook. Hearing McLarty tell his story in the rich baritone of his actor-turned-writer’s voice, I clearly remember thinking, “One day, I, too, want to share my stories in audio form.” After hearing him speak, I read his book. Then, I listened to him read it. I felt as if he represented every inflection and pause just as I’d imagined. Yes, one day I’d love to do that. First, though, I had to write the book. Fast forward ten years. In the fall of 2015, at a reception for the incomparable Doris Kearns-Goodwin before hearing her speak, a colleague from Children’s Hospital encouraged me to consider recording one of my books as an audiobook. Shortly after that, before a noontime medical lecture, another colleague at University Hospital said she consumed most of her fiction from audible.com, and if my work found its way onto an audiobook format, she’d love to hear it. Maybe these two had a point. I did love reading aloud to my kids. I did hear the voices of my characters when I wrote them. What would it look like to bring them to life in a recording booth? Finally, on Thanksgiving Day 2015, these disparate desires coalesced into opportunity. While dining with my cousin, a trained voice talent (who, ironically, has voiced the part of a doctor in commercials), I shared my desires to narrate my own work. From her own professional experience, she knew who to call. All I had to do was pick up the phone. I did. Twelve months later. Sol Stein’s book, Stein on Writing, has perhaps the best twelve pages on writing effective dialogue I have ever encountered. His comments on A Writer’s Voice are not bad either. According to...
read more