An author finds his voice. Or at least his audiobook narrator.

First, I don’t like my voice. Never have. When I listen to recordings of it, I cringe and squirm at the sound of it. This phenomenon is called “vocal confrontation.” Another reason for my discomfort was that I am not what you would call an audiobook person. I say this without any blame to all the audiobook people who rightly and loudly love their medium and defend it against the knee-jerk haters, purists who dismiss audiobooks as diet reading. I would never do that!

It’s more that, as a music critic here at The Washington Post, I spend most of my waking and working hours in a state of intense and attentive listening. Books offer a certain release from that listening, for they allow me to focus all my attention on the page and capture the quiet flow of a good paragraph, the quiet trickle of words. My voice has no place in such a pleasant scene.

When I asked my book’s editor if I would be the de facto narrator — exuding an enthusiasm that I now feel was an achievement purely for my own benefit — she gently broke the “no.” Market research and reader feedback clearly indicated that audiobook consumers generally prefer professional narrators, which was not the case for me. I’m not sure I’ve ever let go so completely.

Instead, she said, I would be sent a selection of audio files – short audition clips of potential speakers reading excerpts from my book. My relief was now replaced by another worry. After all, this book is quite personal. You could say it is very emotional at times. The idea of ​​hiring another voice to – what, represent? approximate? imitate? – find my own was almost as nerve-wracking as the thought of reading the thing myself.

The book is called Swole: The Making of Men and the Meaning of Muscle, and it combines a memoir of my own journey in the gym with a cultural history of men’s enduring desire to become musclemen. But even the history part is personal – simply an attempt to boil down my gym efforts to a set of essential questions: Why am I doing this? What is desirable about muscle and why? What do muscles mean?

But as I wrote the book, it also became a larger story about men, about the many ways we contort ourselves to fit comfortably into the unforgiving mold of masculinity, and about the role our bodies play in constructing and portraying our idea of ​​what masculinity looks and sounds like. But what does it sound like when you challenge what masculinity sounds like?

Choosing a voice for your story is a bit like choosing a font for your text. Imagine a novel written in Comic Sans (like a passive-aggressive note hanging above the microwave in the office), and you have a good analogy for what the wrong voice can do to a book. The comparison is even more apt when you consider the emerging industry of AI-powered automated narration services—which represent particularly enticing opportunities for self-published authors looking for low-cost solutions, publishers of complex technical texts, or those needing quick translations into foreign languages.

Google’s current offering touts the “top-notch voice quality” of robot voice artists like Mary (a matronly librarian’s wife perfect for bedtime stories or muffin recipes), Marcus (a bass-voiced papa bear with long stories), and Michelle (a graduate student in an MFA program with an internship at NPR and plenty of fact-checked knowledge).

Some of these artificial voices may be deceptive for a moment or two, but then Mary’s tone falters or Marcus mispronounces a word. These well-meaning, well-read bots give even the greatest literature all the depth of a customer service menu.

My selection of real-life narrators was downright old-fashioned in their abundance of thoroughly human subtleties and allusions.

There was A, whose voice was a little stilted and whose breath seemed to wrap each word like a scarf. Every sentence sounded like it was describing rich, thick, delicious milk chocolate. There was B—a clean-cut, crisp guy who sounded like a district manager and who could easily sell an extended warranty on a new Ford Escape, but maybe not the story of my first kiss with another man. And there was C, a gruff, suicidal ambassador of general Gen-X malaise—all stubble, swagger, and flannel. He didn’t seem to get any of my jokes.

And just when I gave up hope, D – or Mark, as I know him now. His voice was a familiar in-between: neither young nor old, neither masculine nor feminine, educated but unsure. Anyone who has ever heard me speak – or read my writing – knows (and tolerates) my stubborn penchant for asides and interjections like this one. Mark nailed them all: every cheeky pun or gimmick, every hidden gay nuance, every little glance at the camera. Even in one snippet of my story, he sounded like he knew it all.

When asked to suggest the book’s cover, my only request was that it should express masculinity while somehow subverting it. The designer rose to the challenge with a bold, muscular presentation (focusing on 16th-century etchings of Hercules Farnese) and a disarmingly soft color palette of butter yellow, sea green, and lush magenta. Mark’s voice did the same with the material in some ways: it was intellectual, musical, knowing, and – in a book about men – subversive. He occupies the box of masculinity while making it clear that he is uncomfortable with the adjustments.

After the recording, Mark — full name Mark Sanderlin, an audiobook narrator based in New York — told me he had no illusions about being a no-brainer for “Swole.” The youthful inflection and cheerful sing-song of his voice unofficially disqualifies him for nonfiction, for which authors often want a deep, authoritative tone.

Or, as he put it, “They want it read to them the way they want it read to them.”

As a child in Oregon, Sanderlin played theater roles and supporting roles in films. He went to college in New York, where he studied music business with a focus on voice. As a producer and keyboardist, he amassed a lot of audio equipment. When the pandemic hit, a vocal booth he built in his living room became his new office as he turned to storytelling. It was the perfect career for a theater boy who grew up wanting to play all the characters in “Gypsy.”

Sanderlin observes the rise of AI narrators and their potential to take over human speaking roles with a certain amount of bemusement. Sure, they can read text, but they can’t feel it: bots can’t sense irony or sarcasm. They don’t understand the cultural references from my childhood. They can’t suddenly switch into Arnold Schwarzenegger’s accent and adapt it to the context. They have no idea what to do with my quotation marks.

Instead, you get a monotonous rhythm and a disturbing distance between voice and emotion – 10 hours of it can feel downright dehumanizing.

Sanderlin estimated that it took him nearly 20 hours to record my book—about two studio hours for every hour of finished audio.

“It’s arduous, physically demanding work, sitting motionless in a hot, padded box for hours,” he said. “But you also have to concentrate, sit very still and make sure that what comes out of your mouth sounds natural and conversational.”

To Sanderlin’s ears, any capable audiobook narrator can tell anything, but a deeper connection to the text elevates the final product. And to my ears (and my indescribable relief), Sanderlin does just that, transmitting my story from one body to another, just as a book would.

Somewhere in his voice lives an awareness of the spirit of language that doesn’t need to be translated. And somewhere in my story, Mark found something that sounded like his own voice.

“Sometimes I worry about being seen as just a ‘gay narrator,'” he said (quotation marks mine). “But I’m also proud that I get to be the voice of these books.” And then he takes the words right out of my mouth: “I am a gay man who exists in the world. And I sound like one.”