When the author reads part of their own memoir, the narrator’s job changes. You’re no longer the only voice of the story. You’re the support act to the person who actually lived it, and your work is to make the handover between you sound seamless.
I’ve done this twice: on No Handcuffs with Eddie Richardson, and on The Dirty Dozen with Noel “Razor” Smith.
Why would an author narrate their own memoir?
Because nobody can fake that voice. When Eddie Richardson talks, it’s a window into what really happened. It roots the story and gives it credibility. No actor, however good, can give a listener that.
What an author usually can’t do is sustain ten hours in a booth. Reading aloud for a living is a very high-level skill, often likened to elite marathon running! At the end of three days in a booth it’s sometimes impossible to read even the simplest sentence. So the work gets shared: the author might do the introduction or epilogue, where their own voice matters most, and the narrator carries the rest.
What’s it like recording separately?
Often you don’t share a room at all. On The Guv’nor In His Own Words, a multi-cast production rather than an author read, the cast all recorded in their own studios. My lines as Lenny had to play off dialogue that had been recorded somewhere else, by people I couldn’t see.
It’s an odd discipline. You’re reacting to a voice in your headphones as if the person were across the table, and keeping the energy right for a conversation that never happened in one room. The trick is to actively listen, the same as you would on stage, and then react. The American acting teacher Sanford Meisner said “Acting is living truthfully under imaginary circumstances”. Voice acting, you could say, is living truthfully under recorded circumstances.
Is co-narrating harder than narrating alone?
Different, rather than harder. On your own, you set the tone for the whole book. With a “double” or “triple header”, you’re fitting yourself around someone else’s, and that takes more listening than talking.
Hear the results in No Handcuffs, The Dirty Dozen and The Guv’nor In His Own Words.
About Karl
Karl Jenkinson is an award-winning British audiobook narrator and voiceover actor.
Book Karl for narration