8/25/2023 0 Comments Julia whelan books“They don’t put real narrators up.Popular audiobooks narrated by Julia Whelan Photographs lined the walls: Michelle Obama (“American Grown”). ![]() “I still get residuals from acting shit I did when I was ten”-most recently, a couple of hundred dollars for “Fifteen and Pregnant,” in which she played Kirsten Dunst’s chaste younger sister.Īt the studio, she greeted Gildea with a hug. “It’s an egregious miscarriage! This industry hasn’t caught up with how popular audiobooks are,” she said. She is paid per finished hour of recording, and although Whelan is at the top of her field, her hourly rate is only twice what it was a decade ago. Narrators straddle the publishing and entertainment fields, yet often reap the financial upside of neither. Pronunciation research is arduous: “A piece about the cuisine of the Faroe Islands will come through, and I’m, like, ‘Fucking pass!’ ” (She did that one nonetheless.)Īfter breakfast, on the way to the studio, she vented about the pay scale. “I actually had COVID while recording that viral New York Times piece about COVID by Jessica Lustig,” she said. The Trump years were draining, as was the pandemic. She also regularly records long nonfiction pieces for the Audm app (which produces audio versions of The New Yorker’s stories). “I’m pitching it as ‘In a World’ meets ‘You’ve Got Mail,’ ” she said. “Thank You for Listening,” her second novel, a rom-com about two audio narrators, is out next week. “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.” (“Try aging a voice over three hundred years.”) “The Four Winds.” (“Accents all over the place!”) The most stressful title in her recording queue, she said, is her own. (“I think they’ve gone through all the older people,” she said.) At the 2019 Audies-the Oscars with less cleavage, more eyeglasses, zero assault-she won best female narrator, for Tara Westover’s “Educated.” “It’s a brilliant book, but there are so many I’ve sweated more!” she said. Whelan has recorded more than five hundred audiobooks, and has received AudioFile’s Golden Voice, an honor for lifetime achievement. Instead, she has quietly become a star of the unrecognizable kind. Rehab would’ve been.” She said, “I wasn’t Natalie Portman.” A producer told her, “College isn’t sexy. ![]() ![]() The book, “Gone Girl,” has sold more than ten million copies in all formats.Īfter studying English at Middlebury, she returned to Hollywood to start auditioning again. The fee was a couple of thousand dollars. novels.) One day, she got an e-mail from Gildea, asking if she’d like to narrate a new book. The two met in 2012, when Whelan, then twenty-seven, was making her living tutoring celebrities’ kids. “Very pandemic.” That day, she fled the jackhammering of workers installing a pool in her back yard for the offices of Penguin Random House Audio, where she could work alongside a longtime producer of hers, Kelly Gildea. She generally spends workdays at home, in the Coachella Valley, sitting alone in a dark padded booth, staring at a screen, talking to herself. Whelan, who has stick-straight brown hair and pale skin, wore a loose black jumpsuit. “Makes you phlegmy.” But her biggest job hazard is her stomach. “My lips go numb.” Cheese is also a no-no in her line of work. She had only fourteen pages to record that day, new material for the tenth-anniversary edition of Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl.” She ordered carefully anyway, requesting the spicy mayo on the side. ![]() “And then I got on the call and was, like, ‘Oh. “I was doing my makeup and shit,” she said. She had been up at six to Zoom with a Canadian book club for the blind. The other morning, Whelan had a meeting at Bad-Ass Breakfast Burritos, in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. Most people have never heard Whelan’s name, but her friendly-firm timbre is familiar to anyone who listens to books or magazine articles. “I’m kind of on a Julia Whelan bender,” a reader tweeted recently. There are a lot of voices in our heads these days, some more welcome than others.
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