Time machine time. Let’s go back about a year.
It’s break time at the Medford library, and I decide to spend it on a quick walk around downtown Medford with my earbuds in, listening to an audiobook.
It doesn’t take long for a passage to stop me dead in my tracks. The words are so close to home that they could serve as my driveway, relevant enough to be a snippet from a personalized TED Talk that’s just for me; a strange brew of therapy and reflection.
It’s from Whalefall by Daniel Kraus. I don’t know it yet, but the survival story about a teenage boy who gets – accidentally – swallowed by a sperm whale during a dive at Monastery Beach will become my favorite book of 2023.
For now, the soothing, grim cadence of narrator Kirby Heyborne is a sudden ice storm, freezes me in mid-stride.
“Jay, baby, your dad’s got cancer.”
“Jay” is Jay Gardiner, the accidental whale gullet denizen. “Dad” is Mitt Gardiner: gruff, embittered; tortured, in a way. He’s an experienced scuba diver who makes a conscious choice to live outside the bounds of contemporary society. Jay isn’t him. Their relationship is one of clashes and skirmishes. Eventually, Jay moves out. Then Mom calls, tells him the news.
“What kind?” (Jay asks.)
“It’s mesothelioma. It’s in the lining over his lungs. I’ve been trying to get him to go to the doctor for months.”
I freeze because my dad has the same ailment, has been fighting it for years since his diagnosis in 2016 or so. I’ve written extensively about my dad, about his illness, about the suffering he’s endured. Mesothelioma doesn’t play fair, taunts, kicks you while you’re down (like most cancers.) Heck, it has a whole genre of TV commercials devoted to it and the financial compensation you may be entitled to if it decides to move in.
But there’s something about hearing the word…the specific, stomach-knotting word, that makes my muscles seize up. On a pulp-and-paper book’s page, I might be able to see it coming out of the corner of my eye. But hearing Mr. Heyborne gasp out the word like it’s profanity, akin to a jump scare, is different than reading it on a page. More personal. It’s like two people – narrator and author – are there for me.
***
I’ve loved audiobooks since I was a child.
The earliest one I can remember listening to was a companion to a Halloween picture book, a tour through a haunted house where your guide was a vampire. I haven’t listened to it in literal decades, but as I type this, I can hear the opening seconds in my head, the exact words and tone.
*door creaks*
“I bid you welcome to Creepy Hollow. Come into the haunted house. Come in! I won’t bite you, but something else…might.”
*maniacal laughter*
This story was on a cassette tape. Remember those? Remember fast forwarding and rewinding and the chipmunk-huffing-helium sound that accompanied that act? Other early standouts – also on cassette, and most from the library – included Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and anthologies of southwest U.S. folktales written and narrated by the famed Joe Hayes (The Checker-Playing Hound Dog and The Day It Snowed Tortillas.)
Like my vampire tour guide, I can hear certain parts of these stories in my head, down to the most microscopic voice intonations and rhythms.
Why? Part of it, I’m sure, is that I listened to these stories multiple times: in my bedroom, in my parents’ cars (if they were feeling generous), on our family room stereo system. But science seems to have a bit more to add.
A 2020 National Literacy Trust research report by Emily Best called Audiobooks And Literacy: A Rapid Review of the Literature states:
“Hearing a story being read can give a learning reader a better understanding of pronunciation and tone, as well as helping them understand the emotional pitch of a story. Author Pam Varley notes, for example, how hearing Harry Potter gives children a better idea of how to pronounce ‘Hermione’. Also, accessing audiobooks increases the opportunity to benefit from so many of the other skills that reading fosters.”
The report also references a 2008 paper by Gene Wolfsen, which states:
“Since the reading process develops through our experiences with oral language, audiobooks simply provide another opportunity to increase the understanding and appreciation of the written word. Audiobooks can model reading, teach critical listening, build on prior knowledge, improve vocabulary, encourage oral language usage, and increase comprehension. Essentially, reading audiobooks supports the development of all four language systems: phonological, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic.”
OK, excellent. But these are academic benefits, in my opinion. What about the moments where a spoken passage can freeze me in my tracks during a walk on my break?
Luckily, the 2020 paper touches on this, too, and goes so far as to compare the emotional impact of audiobooks to book-to-film adaptations.
“Research also shows that audiobooks elicit higher levels of emotional engagement than filmic experiences of the same stories. In a 2018 study run by the Experimental Psychology department at UCL, subjects were played both audio and film adaptions of a selection of popular novels from different genres, including titles ranging from ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ (1887) to ‘The Girl on the Train’ (2015). After experiencing each of these, subjects answered questions about their levels of engagement but also had their physiological responses measured in terms of heart rate (linked to information processing) and body temperature (linked to emotional arousal) to assess less conscious forms of engagement. The results showed that while subjects reported the videos to be more engaging than the audiobooks, their physiological changes suggested that they were in fact more engaged with the audiobooks than the films.”
I wonder if, with audiobooks, that’s because we get the best of both worlds. You get a polished, well-informed narrator, but your imagination is still required to work to get the most out of the story they tell.
In the case of Whalefall though, the positive academic points touched on by the research paper didn’t change a simple fact: hearing someone speak about mesothelioma in a story about redemption and a father-son relationship touched something so deeply within me, that there aren’t words for it. That moment I froze on my work break because of one horrific passage defies explanation. I felt seen. I felt understood. Traditional reading has yielded similar results, offering teaching and healing and helping me make sense of things.
But hearing it was just different. This may be just me, but it felt like the story was paying attention…to me. Not the other way around.
It’s a perspective I’ve kept alive since then, this idea of a story as something that’s there for you, offering answers and empathy when you’re seeking such things. In therapy, they call significant, positive moments for patients “breakthroughs,” and it’s how I’m choosing to classify the moment an audiobook version of a story hit the pause button on my walk.
Moments in stories that can affect you so acutely achieved their shock and awe for reasons that are deeper than the story itself. I responded the way I responded to Whalefall because it’s about a journey, about a response to pain; not the pain itself. Having a thoughtful narrator impart this truth to me while I was on a walk had a different kind of impact than if I had read it in a more traditional way. I’m grateful for that moment. Like the ones I experienced with other cassette tape audiobooks as a child, it’s stuck in my head forever.