Other Voices

On The Memory Palace Audiobook

On the night my book came out, I did a live performance at the theater at KPCC, one of my local public radio stations. It was, quite honestly, wonderful. A room filled with friends and family and, in its way, just importantly, total strangers. Told some stories, A’d some Q’s from my dear friend, Amy Nicholson, the chief film critic at the L.A. Times, and, for the first time, signed some books.

I really love doing live events and hadn’t done any since before lock-down. It was exciting and pretty moving to be back to it. A familiar pleasure that, it its way, didn’t move me toward what I think I’d hoped to reach there on Publication Day. I suppose I was hoping something would bring the whole of it — the months of writing and rewriting and puzzling over structure, the months of waiting for it to come out, the years of wanting to publish a Memory Palace book that preceded it all — into presence, into some awareness that this actually happening. The book release party wasn’t quite that.

But on the drive home, my wife asked what I’d thought about the audiobook version of “Dreamland.” I hadn’t heard it yet. I hadn’t heard any of it; I hadn’t had time. So she cued it up and listened to my daughter, at fifteen years old, though she had since turned sixteen, read a Memory Palace story aloud that, for awhile, when she was about five, she would listen to to fall asleep.

And then we got home and I was pretty wired after a particularly busy and heady day so I took Goldie, our weird, rescue farm dog, out for a longer-than-usual walk in our neighborhood. The air was clear and cool after a wind storm had blown away the clouds the night before. I started to flip through the audiobook, sampling a bit of each story, getting a sense of what the different readers sounded like.

And as I bounced around the digital book, I started to get a sense of what I’d achieved for the first time. The book has been this odd abstraction to me; something about the discomfort of stepping out of my standard mode of writing these stories primarily to be heard had made the whole thing feel like an act of translation. I never felt entirely comfortable, never entirely whether it was reading the way I wanted it to. Throughout the writing process, I sometimes felt afraid that that translation was like minting Canadian money: that sure feels like a quarter in my pocket but it just doesn’t work in the parking meter. And somehow, the book, even in its physical form, even sitting on my own bookshelf in my own home, still didn’t feel like it, I don’t know, embodied the work and the spirit of the work that went into it. Not then. The audiobook changed that.

There was something about hearing all these voices that made me immensely proud. Here were friends and colleagues I admire tremendously from the public radio and podcasting world, here was my kid, here were a few of my favorite audiobook readers, and here were Hollywood actors who I literally only knew from screens, who happened to like my show enough to want to be a part of it. Random House had no plans spend any extra money on this production; it was just supposed to be me and my voice, and they’d paid me already. But I had succeeded in pitching them on letting me do something more ambitious and make an audiobook that I — a lover of audiobooks— would love to listen too. And here I was, walking around my block with my dog, listening to Lili Taylor read a story I’d written years before. I had made that happen. And, I know audio. It is, if not my whole deal, not not my whole deal. I knew it was working. I knew that this coin in my pocket could pay for my parking. I could hear this story with fresh ears in a way that I couldn’t read with fresh eyes, which has, in turn, helped give me some faith that the book works too. It looks good up there on the shelf, anyway.

Buy the Audiobook

Most folks who listen regularly to audiobooks have a preferred method of getting their audiobooks (I, myself, am an Audible subscriber for going on 20 years). If you are not one of those people, I personally recommend clicking this link to the audiobook on Libro.fm, which is a great service that allows you to download audiobooks without a subscription and support the independent book store of your choice at the same time.

The Audiobook Cast-List

Since I occasionally get emails and social-media messages asking for this, here goes:

• Dedication - Nate DiMeo

• A Welcome - Nate DiMeo

• Distance - Nate DiMeo

• Gigantic - Rebecca Lowman

• The Nickel Candy Bar - Ryan Reynolds

• Hercules - Dominic Hoffman

• A Brief Eulogy Written After Noticing That the New York Times’ Obituary for Carla Wallenda, the Last Surviving Child of the Original Flying Wallendas Acrobatic Troop, Died of Unknown Causes - Robin Miles

• A History of Martian Civilization, 1877 - 1906 - Latif Nassar

• Zulu Charley, Romeo, a Love Story - Nate DiMeo

• At the White House Easter Egg Roll of 1899 - Nate DiMeo

• The Glowing Orbs - Dominic Hoffman

• The Prairie Chicken in Wisconsin: Highlights of a Study of Counts, Behaviors, and Movements - Betsy Brandt

• A Timeline of the History of the Temple of Dendur - Nate DiMeo

• Points Excised from the Timeline of the History of Temple of Dendur - Nate DiMeo

• Dreaming Caroline - Nate DiMeo

• Seven Stories - Jad Abrumrad

• Elizabeth - Robin Miles

• Fifty Words Written About the Arctic Bowhead Whale After Learning that it can Live for Over 200 Years - Lili Taylor

• Perigrinar - Daniel Alarcon

• New England Granite - Nate DiMeo

• 1,347 Birds - Lili Taylor

• Natural Habitat - Rebecca Lowman

• Crazy Bet - Robin Miles

• Enlargement - Nate DiMeo

• The Surfman - Dominic Hoffman

• Guinea Pigs - Hrishikesh Hirway

• Betty Robinson - Carrie Coon

• A Washington Monument - Nate DiMeo

• George Melendez Wright - Kai Ryssdal

• Ne Weinberg - Rebecca Lowman

• Below From Above - Roman Mars

• Stories About the St. Louis - Rebecca Lowman

• Full Circle - Rebecca Lowman

• Looking Up - Avery Trufelman

• As They Were in Life - Nate DiMeo

• Six Scenes from the Life of William James Sidis, Wonderful Boy - Robin Miles

• Scott Carpenter, One Time Astronaut - Nate DiMeo

• Four Hundred Words for 79th Street - Dominic Hoffman

• Snakes! - Robin Miles

• The Wheel - Dominic Hoffman

• AKA Leo - Rebecca Lowman

• Dreamland - Quinby Gerstein-DiMeo

• Origin Stories, or Six Stories Drawn from the Author’s Life as a Younger Person that could have, in the Aggregate, Served as an Introduction of Sorts to this Book, but that would have been Weird, so Here They Are Presented Near the End - Nate DiMeo

• These Words, Forever - Nate DiMeo

• Credits - Nate DiMeo