Audiobooks Is Reading Two
A mental health triptych
Things have been rocky for ol’ Robbie lately.
But I have been picking up part-time work1 and as such, have been spending a lot of time listening to audiobooks in the car again. And I wanna talk about ‘em!
Here are the last three that I got a lot out of:
A while ago, I asked my Facebook friends for audiobook recommendations. I love when audiobooks take the format seriously and create unique experiences you can’t get by reading the book yourself. Which is not to say reading is bad (lulz), but some books make the transition into audio in a way that they become uniquely beautiful art in their own right.
So my friend Eliel recommended Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez. I checked it out from the Libby app based solely on his enthusiasm for it. And holy shit, was he right. I don’t know what the audiobook equivalent of a page-turner is (pause-avoider? play-unencumberer?), but this is that.
The story jumps between three perspectives: third-person sections from the viewpoints of Jack Martin (ultra-famous sculptor) and Raquel Toro (an art history undergrad at Brown University), and a first-person account from Anita de Monte. Anita is a Cuban-American artist who is (disasterously) married to Martin. There is an early shocker of a spoiler that I will give you the option to ignore if you just want to listen to this book yourself and not have the experience tainted anymore by my nonsense. You can skip to the next book in this post. It is your choice!
So, one night, after Anita tells Jack she’s filing for divorce based on evidence of his infidelity, he responds by throwing her out of their 34th-floor window, killing her. Which is also when we realize that Anita is narrating her sections from an afterlife. The other character, Raquel, is seemingly unrelated to these two until we hear that she will be writing her senior thesis on Jack Martin (over a decade after Anita’s death). She is unaware that Jack killed Anita, doesn’t know who Anita even is (despite also being a very talented and important artist), and we come to find that that wasn’t accidental.
The three actors reading for each character are insanely talented - Stacy Gonzalez, Jonathan Gregg, and Jessica Pimentel (who was on Orange Is the New Black, apparently). They aren’t just trying to communicate the text of the story; they make their characters alive. It’s basically an extremely long radio play with really elaborate stage directions. And just like how reading plays as literature is fulfilling, I am certain reading the book itself is as well.
When I told Eliel how much I loved the audiobook, he also let me know that it is actually inspired by the real life of artist Ana Mendieta. Much of her biography and work is copy and pasted into this story (the book is dedicated to Mendieta). Jack is also based on the real husband/sculptor/murderer Carl Andre, who died less than two months before the book’s publication.
When thinking back on the book through this lens, the message about power in the (art) world is much less hypothetical. As True as it feels, it is also largely true (which, maybe unfortunately, makes it even more True for me). It’s a gift that Gonzalez has given me, this breakdown of all the forces at play that create the ripe environment for someone who clearly murdered their wife to be acquitted, the oxygen that murderous husbands throughout history breathe every day. And while very few of us are actually murderers, we (the white we) contribute to this environment of entitlement that give silent permission and cover to the Martin/Andres of the world to do literally whatever they want.
Please listen to this book so I can talk to someone else about it!
The next audiobook that spoke (directly) to me was Maria Bamford’s Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere. If you are a fan of Bamford’s comedy (or her great voice work on cartoons like Adventure Time) then you know that she is utterly singular. It’d be real hard to say she’s “like a cross between so-and-so and what’s-her-face” without referencing a manic woodland creature and/or a haunted space radio from space. A singular sensation!
Which is why Bamford reading her own memoir is possibly the superior experience to reading it in your brain (you should still read it, probably). But I’d like to hear her read other people’s memoirs, too. I think the vast majority of authors should not read their own work; writing and performing are two different talents and it’s rare to be good at both2. And nobody should be expected to be good at one thing, let alone two!
Many of the “cults” Bamford reflects on are her different 12-step programs (and which she actually gets a lot out of). This is kind of a no-no, which she acknowledges, because it means she is breaking the anonymity part of being in a _____ Anonymous. But the thing is, if nobody talks about all the many, many fellowships that exist beyond just those for alcoholics or gamblers, then our shared cultural vocabulary has a vast dearth where so many people might be able to see themselves. Part of many addicts’ journeys is the thought that they are alone and are the only ones who are as uniquely messed up as they are. So we have to have some folks like Bamford willing to break the anonymity on behalf of all of society. And not just so that addicts can know they’re not alone and that there are tools to help them, but also so that nonaddicts can be better informed community and family to addicts. Possibly allowing everyone to intervene much earlier, before “our lives had become unmanageable.”
But Bamford is not trying to position herself as a guru or charismatic leader showing you The Way. She is often bewildered by her own actions and presents that bewilderment for us to be bewildered by as well. In many ways, her story is like anti-advice (she says to do meth instead of commit suicide, for example3), but we still see how she got to a hard-won life of boundaries, routines, and medications that seem more manageable for her unique psychological and behavioral gumbo. It’s funny and heartbreaking. I relate fully and partially to so much, especially the parts where she eats peanut butter out of the jar with a fork.
The final audiobook that I want to talk about is Mark Dawidziak’s A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allen Poe.
I won’t spend a ton of time talking about it, but in light of the Jack Martin/Carl Andre discussion above, as well as the discussion of mental illness and addiction, this fairly comprehensive look at Poe’s biography is instructive. He had a pretty effed up life, though much of the effedness is from self-sabotaging by way of petty literary fights and ill-advised, poorly-timed drunkenness (he was also maybe allergic to alcohol). There is a lot of it-was-a-different-timesing throughout, most notably when discussing his marriage to his 13-year-old first cousin, Virginia (he still lied on their marriage license, saying she was 21, so as to avoid a scandal). His friends always talked gushingly about how much he loves Virginia (who he calls Sissy, because she was also like a sister to him, and her mom, his aunt, a surrogate mother).
The book is split between two timelines: 1) Poe’s life story and 2) all of what is known of the events that led up to his death at 40 (the aforementioned “mystery of mysteries”). There are many parallels between Poe’s mentality and that of the Jack Martin character. The entitlement, the manipulations, the hubris. One of the subtexts of the whole story is basically like, “Do you see all of the benefits of white supremacy that Eddie keeps messing up?”
As an audiobook, it’s fine. I wouldn’t say it contributes to the art form, but I also like nonfiction audiobooks simply for the information they provide. They don’t gotta gimme chills!
All of this to say, I have been thinking a lot about my own life and addictions, my manipulations and learned helplessnesses. My white-guy-ness. Much like the supporting characters in all three books, I can see the ways in which I have touched people’s lives for better and (many times) for worse. Whether in the ways I have contributed to the environment that makes a Carl Andre possible or the actual people I have directly hurt, I’ve been in a decades-long, bewildering battle against my own privilege and behavior.
But, as I have read elsewhere, understanding how you are the way you are is only helpful when you might need to give yourself some grace in service of doing better, without getting weighed down by shame. And I don’t do better by stopping at grace or by wishing I would. There are tools for this and I just have to constantly decide to find them, use them.
Audiobooks don’t just have to stop at entertainment, or to make the commute go by more bearably - they can be a form of meditation and medication. They can be the things you need to hear, when you needed to hear them.
Doing native garden rehab for The Conservation Foundation, as well as community engagement with large-scale solar and wind projects in Illinois. Give me your gigs tho!
In the audiobook realm, I think people like Hanif Abdurraqib, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Barbara Kingsolver bring a real living soul to their readings. But I am mostly glad that audiobook producers hire voice actors.
Which she says in a passage all about harm reduction. And while nobody would actually advise one do meth instead of killing oneself, the joke highlights all of things that one COULD do to get out of the dark brain place, even if they’re miles away from perfect.