With My Oxford Year, the first-person possessive in the title didn’t help. Nor did the fact that I had spent a year at Oxford. The default assumption, I’ve discovered, is that it’s a memoir. I’ve even had friends who haven’t yet read it say to me, years after the book came out, “Wait, it’s fiction?”
With Thank You for Listening, I’ve already accepted that explaining the story to people will also require explaining how it’s not my story, and admittedly, at first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much daylight between myself and my main character: I used to be an on-camera actress; I am now an audiobook narrator; I once recorded a lot of Romance, under a pseudonym, which I did—in part—to help pay for a grandparent’s care.
I also have a hunch that many die-hard audiobook fans will try to take my fictional characters and graft real narrators onto them （especially Brock）。 I will nip this in the bud: I specifically, intentionally, mindfully did not write my colleagues. Each character, from Alice to Mark to the engineers, are, if anything, pastiches of our industry’s “types,” or in the case of Ron Studman and others, whole cloth inventions. I learned this lesson with My Oxford Year. When my British friends knew I was writing the story and asked me—half excitement, half dread—if they were in it, I was able to truthfully say no, and it was such a relief.
I would also caution: Just as My Oxford Year was not my Oxford year, nor anyone else’s for that matter, this glimpse into audiobooks is not the whole picture; it’s not even a view from “the narrator’s perspective.” It is one narrator’s perspective, filtered through the self-selective and self-serving lens of fiction.
In truth, the most autobiographical part of the novel is also the most universal. Like so many others, I had a beloved grandparent who suffered from dementia. By far, the most real-life moment in the whole book is when BlahBlah tells Sewanee what it feels like to lose her bearings in reality. I was gifted that exchange from my grandfather, after he called me at 4 A.M. from his room in an assisted living facility telling me he was at a conference at the beach waiting for my father （who’d been dead for three years） to pick him up. Six hours later, he was clearheaded enough to tell me what I’ve now told you （though I changed the particular examples to better suit Blah’s backstory）。
But I am not Sewanee. She is not me. Because, while the biographies might look similar, there’s one major alteration （besides a missing eye）， which, to quote Frost, “made all the difference.”
When we speak of autobiography—or, really, autofiction—it seems to me there’s more nuance in the concept than we acknowledge. After all, what defines a person? Is it what happens to them? Or is it who they are? Writers are encouraged to “write what you know,” but “what you know” can mean anything. A profession, sure. A character, of course. A setting, obviously. But it can also just mean . . . an emotion. A feeling. A conviction.
The idea of writing a rom-com set in the Romance audiobook world came to me ten years ago, when I was knee-deep in the Romance audiobook world. It came when I was doing a dual narration with a narrator who’s like a little brother to me, and the e-mails we were sending back and forth, the phone calls—are you adding moans to the sex scenes? Just how growly are you making his voice?—were, objectively, hilarious.
It’s a weird job. There’s no way around it. And it seemed like perfect fodder for something.
But what?
Over the years, this story lived as a screenplay. It lived, in my head, for a time, as a staged one-woman show. When I first began conceiving of it as a book, I thought Nick might be an author, writing under the June French pen name, who falls in love with his audiobook narrator, who, of course, doesn’t know his true identity. That would have worked. But as audiobooks, and by extension narrators, became more popular, I witnessed the fandom that grew up around Romance audio’s biggest male stars and I knew I wanted to write about that.
In the summer of 2017, when I’d turned in the final draft of My Oxford Year and people were asking what I was working on next, this idea was leading the pack, but I had two problems. I didn’t know if people cared enough about audiobooks to care about this book and I didn’t know who my main character was.
Then audiobooks exploded in popularity and I felt confident that most people had at least heard of audiobooks, even if they’d never before thought about the narrators behind them.
But my main character was still a question.