Recording “Molly”

On the experience of recording "Molly" for audiobook, and how it changed the way I think about writing as shared experience

Over the last ten days, I spent time in a local recording studio tracking a reading of Molly for Audible. I hadn’t spent much time with the book since finishing up my reading tour, badly needing distance from the headspace required to be able to read from it, much less think about it. But I also wanted the recording to be mine, and I had a hard time imagining anybody else performing it, not only for the fortitude and empathy that it’d require of a stranger, but for the fact that there are so many ways to speak a sentence. I needed to make sure the proper feel came through.

I can’t say I was looking forward to the experience. After a few months living outside the book, focusing on getting back to work on other projects and trying to rest from all the noise, I’d just begun feeling more like myself again. From last September through all of March I’d been on edge to say the least, too tired or pissed off to focus on much of anything for long, but throughout the spring and into summer, I’d been feeling the pressure lessen, accepting what had happened to the book for what it was—a stressful but necessary part of publication where you’re forced to let your work become a part of the larger world without you, for better and for worse.

Unlike previous projects, where I felt prepared to see my fiction be manhandled in that fashion without getting upset, letting go of Molly as a text felt totally insane—like I was no longer the expert of my own life and had to learn to abide the potentially bad faith of other readers, who would not necessarily be so empathetic as the people in my real life, as is obviously the case when putting work into the world. For a while, I’d become so furious to feel belittled, ripped up over semantics, and basked in nasty light for what I’d done, I’d begun questioning why I’d ever want to write again, much less publish. Though I’d anticipated, even steeled myself for, hard crossfire, I felt let down by what felt like silence on the part of the community at large—a difficult experience to reckon with or share even with allies, especially given how the uproar, on the surface, resulted in great press and viral sales. My greatest fear about the book, prior to publication, had been that it would fail to pierce the veil I’d felt draped over me in the long, excruciating process of writing, revising, and finding a home for it, eventually feeling somewhat like a leper, having lived a life too scarred to reckon with aboveboard.

But really nothing could have prepared me for what it felt like to have my wounds exposed to so much sun. My usual thick skin about the dissonance between intention and interpretation—in bad faith or good—was all but nowhere to be found, felt mostly in me with a similarly disorienting intensity as the events themselves, but now in public, on social media, where seemingly everybody goes to enact the most divisive versions of themselves, from a remove. For all the pushback, not even one of the people who would attack me so relentlessly online ever showed up IRL to demonize me face to face; far too vulnerable, on their own end, to have to interact with the life behind the language they performed their disapproval of from behind a browser. There’d come to be something of a wall there, then, in my ability to read between the lines of what I’d lived and what I’d written, and then between what I’d written and what others chose to imagine about me as a result. Too much to feel, too close and too fast, in a space where I’d gone to find relief from seeing firsthand the destructive effects of being silenced, shamed for speaking. For a while, nothing positive anyone might say could alleviate the dissonance therein; I’d gotten duped again, I thought, into unexpectedly participating in my own demise, so fuck the world.

Despite all that, as more and more time passed, my early sensitivity started wearing thin. The more I talked to others and received personal letters from strangers about what the book had done for them , how they felt seen, I remembered that the loudest voices are often the cruelest and the least actually engaged. Perhaps counterintuitively, unless you’ve spent any real time around them, “literary types” are often far less open-minded about work that gains any sort of traction in “the scene,” so bent up about their own visibility that any attention paid to others must be a threat—particularly among those who’ve got their head so far up their own ass they can’t smell anything but shit.

In baring so much, I’d in some ways forgotten the long game and gotten stuck on standing up for myself, instead of accepting that the bumps and banging is part of the game too—especially when making work that breaks with traditional decorum, and especially now, in a culture where the work of writing in and of itself is under siege. After all the publicity dies down, a book is just a book, after all; an obvious mediation of life-experience itself, destined for imperfection no matter what, and therefore easily misinterpreted, whether as a ruse, for sheer performance, or because difficultly themed work, by definition, makes some readers so uncomfortable they’d do just about anything to avoid facing what it really is. It’s almost as if I’d forgotten how many writers write to please, recasting anything that doesn’t fall in line the same way a direct threat to their parade of kissing ass. Seen that way, once the raw tedium of being attacked began to fade, I began to remember how to relate to my originating desires as an artist—to be one who walked where others would refuse; to force myself to face my own truth, no matter what cost. In that way, Molly had already been a triumph, and now it had a life all its own. I’d spent enough time already trying to parse context through the kneejerk reactions of total dickheads—time to move on, reclaim my mind, get back to base.

So I’d convinced myself I felt pretty neutral about the recording work. I even felt a little weird when I told people I was going to do it and they reacted with sympathy, anticipating that it’d be hard on me, a serious challenge. While doing readings and events, I noticed that it seemed sometimes the audience took things even more somberly/heavily by default than even I did after having spent three years thinking, writing, and revising. Talking about suicide and trauma had become almost like water to me—a necessary state, perhaps, in needing to be able to return and immerse myself in scenes and ideas that truly hurt. The biggest challenge in preparing the book for publication was that it took so much to be able to face it and unpack it, I’d begun failing to be able to see what the sentences I’d written even said; that every time I read something, I wanted to revise it, never quite able to feel that I’d landed where I meant to. Trying to wrangle the book into its final form had felt like trying to put out fires with a flamethrower, moving one piece to disrupt another in due time; and then of course detractors had latched on to typos and fragments in order to discredit me; an complicated state of ‘sloppiness’ that admittedly did sting to have pointed out, given the context, but especially as a professional editor myself, having worked on it so obsessively for literally thousands of hours, 7/24/365, and still not seen— even if less trifling readers seemed to understand that grammar and syntax weren’t the point.

If anything, the book’s chaotic style—and why I’d chosen to write it early on in my grief—were part of the story itself, a direct reflection of the struggle to narrate facts in a space where so much remained up in the air. I could have waited to write this when less affected, yes, but that would have been a much different sort of book; perhaps a less true one, even, in that the further I got away from my own pain, the less I remembered how it felt to live inside it. The last thing I wanted to make was some platitudinous tome earmarked with conceptually immaculate grace and poise; far from the point, as I felt it then, not to mention how waiting like that would require holding it in even longer than I already had—easy to suggest from an aesthetic remove, but for me, so unrealistic as to be an insult.

The first day in the studio was very nice. The engineer, Aaron, was friendly and warm, and we talked a bit about his relative personal experience with the subject matter in a way that made me feel understood before I even got into the booth. I felt immediately comfortable there, thrown back in feel to more than a decade past making records with my friends. In a different way than writing, being surrounded by equipment, a live mic, felt like an opportunity to rekindle the soul of the book in me without having to expose myself as its creator—instead, it was the text that had a life, and I was its caretaker, not a target.

Immediately, too, as I began to read the work aloud, I felt a shoring up of the distance forced between my present day life and the life that I’d presented in the text. I would never have written this this way, I couldn’t help thinking, from page one—a pretty common feeling for most artists, certainly, given how long the publication process takes, though strange to have to speak for in the present, aware that for the reader, it’s all new. The real intensity, then, of speaking aloud as from the past but in the present, creates a really strange effect, simultaneously a letdown, in that it’s no longer yours to alter, and a relief to see distinct. Both the engineer and the producer understood this without discussion. They took great care to give me room and time to breathe, and took care with directing my performance in a way that made me able to return to who I’d been, at least in voice, while on the inside I felt strapped in, having committed to the ride of laying down the reading line by line, straight to the end.

What I hadn’t expected was how much different reading the book aloud felt than reading it at readings, or in my head. Suddenly, every little disruption—trying my best to speak the sentences clearly, as they were written, but needing to go back when I messed up; or worse, encountering new errors that hadn’t come up previously, newly visible when said aloud—began bringing me right back to the nasty headspace I’d struggled so much to learn to move away from and let go. I’ve never been the kind of writer that likes to read my work aloud during drafting or revision, thinking of language on the page as very different from its utterance, and therefore incompatible as process, and yet hearing it on tape clearly underlined the dysphoria I’d felt in trying to make language fit my story on the page. More and more, I felt sick to think I’d let the book get away from me as such—that I hadn’t been strong enough to locate so many technicalities in prose and had therefore fucked myself in the same stroke that I’d insisted this book needed to be raw. Gone was the relief of knowing people understood this book had been “written in a maelstrom” as The New Yorker noted, meant as a feature, not a bug. Never had this distinction felt less useful, in that the grace notes that occur when a reader reads inside their head had no bearing on what was clearly an error on the tongue. Even as the producer told me that literally every book he’d ever worked on had gone like this—scads of typos rising to the surface, needing correction—I fell right back into shame, raking myself for not having insisted on perfection in a place where no such state even exists.

Some of the typos felt really embarrassing, though. I couldn’t believe it when I ran into the first full repeated sentences, about seven pages apart in places where they both make sense, but were clearly the product of my having been experimenting with where certain language belonged in the book. Then another doubled line 100 pages apart, worded slightly different, almost acceptable in some ironic way I hadn’t intended. At one point I was trying to figure out what the fix was and cursing at the pages and Kevin said, “Yeah, like who wrote this?” in a kind, punny way, and then I started laughing realizing how I was no longer him, that character, nor that narrator.

Later, Wyatt reminded me that during a period of four days alone, during the height of my revision madness, I’d sent him 7 different versions of the book, asking him to ignore all but the most recent. Now, there are 227 files in my “Molly” folder, mainly consisting of different versions of versions of versions and fragments of ephemera, logged in some system I now no longer recognize.

Anyway, I was fucking pissed at fucking up. But the producer was very chill and helpful about took a list of all the edits to send me at the end, which in my heart final like the final final edit as I spoke. I was surprised to find myself choked up at parts that I might not have most expected: our wedding day, Molly’s list of writing ideas, playing with Grace, reading the letter that closes the book. I remembered I’d told myself I should think of the reading as a final performance of the book. The studio brought us free lunch everyday with dope shit from local places and they had a ton of drinks in the fridge and really good snacks. The room we recorded in was decorated with all Nirvana memorabilia. We laughed about thinking about Nirvana flying out to Baltimore to record there.

We worked efficiently, after a brief snafu finalizing the script, which was (haha) not quite the final version. By the end of the first day, having knocked out 80 pages or so, I left the studio in a daze. I’d turned down the free lunch and several times we had to start over because the mic was picking up my stomach noise. The high heat outdoors made perfect sense as I tried to figure out what had just happened, which on its surface had been simple and predictable, while on the inside I felt like I’d been hit by a truck, thrown to high sea. Back at home, all I could stand to do was lie down and cover my head, awash in shitty feelings of having failed myself—and the world—once again. I slept for 24 hours straight, sick upon opening my eyes and realizing I couldn’t change what I’d already done; that I was stuck here with my mistakes, whether they made sense in context or not. I’d already ruined everything, and no one could convince me otherwise, a disgrace that would trail after me forever. Why write anything at all if it had to be on these terms, far too human to ever offer grace in a morass? What the fuck had I gotten myself into, and why hadn’t I known better than to try?

Thankfully, this pit was not as deep as it had last been, having found my way out once before. Rather than beating myself up again, I trusted the process and consoled myself at least with the fact that when this was over, I’d have a living document, devoid of typos finally, and the work would once again be out of my hands. I found resiliency in committing to the understanding that this work was already not my own—that it was written by a younger, struggling version of me, who I could see now more for who he was than I would have if simply having grown up out of him in silence. Even as I read aloud, cringing inside when I’d repeat crutch phrases I hadn’t seen no matter how many times I looked, I realized the person who’d lived this and tried to make sense of it on paper was someone I needed to be then, and no longer had to be now; which didn’t meant the document was wrong, but rather that I’d already moved past it, into new waters it had brokered in a way nothing else could have.

Likewise, it felt weird, but also caring, when the producer, Kevin, would ask me questions about the text during short breaks, curious to be updated about how I felt in the present in comparison to some of the more sensational descriptions of the book’s events. Did I still not want kids? I was remarried, right? What was that like? A shock to the system, in some way, to realize directly how much life had changed not only since the events of the book, but in the writing of it. The logic I’d used to work my way through it all felt like scaffolding around a building rather than the building itself, containing makeshift ways I’d had to think in order to come out the other side intact—still very real, but in a different way now than before, consisting of a specific, vital mode I’d constructed for myself as a means of living through it. The fact that I wouldn’t have written it like this now was in some way precisely why I’d written it—as much to survive as to rediscover my own life.

This clicked most of all near the end of the book, when I came to the section describing what I’d done one year to the day after Molly’s death—one year. I’d already almost forgotten how long it’d been since then, how much I’d worked on myself to learn to grow out of that hole. It seemed insane to me that it had taken so much work to discover and preserve that state in prose, only to be sitting there now, more than three years out from the first full draft, already thinking in such different ways than the story I was narrating, as if I was still the same. No wonder I’d felt so much fury in defending myself in public, I sort of realized—I was more like standing up for the person who had suffered in struggle than I was the body I was there at the mic. I didn’t need to feel the same way he felt any longer, and that was a good thing, even maybe precisely the real reason I’d wanted to write it, as much or more so than trying to reclaim Molly from her death. Literature really is alive in that way—a vessel that can envelop an image of the world as it stands defined against the endless flood of future time. Literature isn’t meant to be a stand-in for life itself; in fact, to try to force it do so would all but destroy it. The effect is more like buoy than a mirror, maybe, and therein a more formidable utility when passed to others with the intent of something more than entertainment, if still with no name for its effect than that which can never be described outside itself. A rather funny form of sharing peace there, which maybe helps explain, too, why people sometimes have a hard time knowing how to react but to recoil.

But to recoil is often simply out of instinct, and the larger story, where there can be one, often exists so far off the page it’s rarely seen. Some politicians-in-artists-costumes type people seem to be becoming babies about this very thing, like Show me the essential moral value of this object or I will banish it to trash, as if all art should be a straight-faced instruction manual on how one should live their life, or at least so relatable it’s a modern parable. Throughout the recording, though, reading aloud in front of two professional strangers the darkest edges of the worst days of my life, I sometimes wondered secretly, deep down, if inside they were gritting their teeth, cringing—especially on typos, which turned out to about 30 in total by the end, but felt more like 3000 along the way, and so infuriating as to make me throw myself against a wall—passively judging me either for the strange path of my life, so different from theirs, or for my rather spastic prose and its effects.

The truth, though, as the experience took form, was that we came together specifically over the challenge of it, taking great care to shape each moment in its best light, with an immediate sensitivity that over time has become the more evident baseline of those who’ve chosen to approach the work with care in context. They gleaned deep context, and sometimes were clearly shaken, would admit so, but in a way that felt akin, helping carry the load in their own ways. Hard as it can be at times to trust from too close up, the eventual effect of opening one’s darkest moments to an audience feels for me less like mere indulgence, as some might claim, and more so a palliative alleviating the need of further suffering to beget growth.

Molly said once that she loved memoirs and thought everyone should write one. She said she thought people liked reading memoirs because it’s nice to see how others live their lives, so that you can share a glimpse of how they do things, mistakes and all—how they get through things. During breaks, I sometimes thought about what she would have thought of the studio, the production, the technical bits and the tone, the texture of my recorded voice. I think I felt her there in a different way than other times, hard to explain here. But when I went into the booth, I closed the soundproofed doubled doors and sat down in the chair and spoke for myself.

At the end of the last session, somewhat to my surprise despite their care and candor throughout, both guys I worked with said they felt like we’d all been through something together; that even after hundreds of audiobook recordings, they’d never experienced one that felt like this. We agreed that though it had been a challenge, we were glad to have gotten the chance to create this document, that itself would now soon have its own life, which we had shared. I walked out of the studio feeling like I could fly if I jumped, and more ready than ever to get back home to my real life.

When I got home, Megan and I went swimming at the nearby public pool. Walking over, Megan told me about her experience publishing LIVEBLOG, and how she related to what was going on with me, and it was really nice to remember another person’s perspective, instead of forever my own blazing me down. We swam hard for like 30 minutes before it started to thunder and they kicked us all out.