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Memoir for your ears: the podcast life

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Memoir for your ears: the podcast life

Siobhán McHugh

INTRODUCTION

In 2014, technological innovation and experimental audio storytelling serendipitously

collided: Apple embedded a native app in its smartphone and an independent US

radio team packaged investigative journalism online as gripping episodic narrative,

called simply ‘Serial’ (2014). Serial took advantage of the untrammeled nature of the

podcast ecology to play with the form: unlike public radio, there were no restrictions

on explicit language or content; episodes could follow a natural narrative arc rather

than be overly condensed or forcibly strung out to suit a broadcast clock; and the

presenter, Sarah Koenig, did not have to sound like a public radio brand – she came

out of the ether unmediated, speaking directly to listeners. Her fans became

companions on her quest, sharing her ups and downs as she tried to figure out if high

school student Adnan Syed really had killed his former girlfriend Hae Min Lee, a

charge of which he had been convicted. Unwittingly, by bringing together a range of

factors – high quality audio production standards, an innovative narration style, strong

investigative journalism and, crucially, the ability to be heard at the touch of a

smartphone button via the new Apple app – Serial became an instant hit, clocking up

five million downloads in the first month (more than double those of This american

life (1995), its begetter). By October 2016, Series One and Two of Serial would have

achieved an astonishing 250 million downloads.

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 Serial’s popularity triggered a podcasting boom (Berry 2015, Bonini 2015, Larson

2015) as media organizations scrambled to emulate its success. But it also caused a

shift in how ‘podcasting’ was perceived: from being merely a technology, it moved to

being viewed as a distinct media genre, following the ‘genre’ definition proposed by

Lüders et al (2010, p. 947) which suggests that emerging genres can be ‘both medium

and outcome of textual practices’. The podcast genre is characterized by a strong

host-listener connection and a narrowcast delivery style that engenders an unusual

level of empathy (Berry 2016). But it also trades on radio’s long-established ability to

trigger listeners’ imaginations and have them co-create their own mental pictures – a

quality shared by the best literary journalism. As critic James Woolcott (2016)

observes:

Podcasts are essentially radio on the installment plan, a return to the

intimacy, wombed shadows, and pregnant implications of words, sounds,

and silences in the theater of the mind.

Podcasting also allowed journalists to move away from the news-centric confines

of traditional journalism into what Deuze & Witschge (2017) describe as a more

entrepreneurial phase that is ‘beyond journalism’. In this space, journalism is

preoccupied with broader societal concerns: what Schudson (2003, p.11) defines as

‘the business or practice of producing and disseminating information about

contemporary affairs of general public interest and importance’. Three journalistic

podcast formats have come to the fore: the crafted narrative, the ‘chumcast’, in which

two or more experts or pals riff on a theme, and the performative interview (McHugh

2016a, 2016b). Whether these shows are expressly created as podcast-only, or

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delivered online as time-shifted radio programs, intimacy and authenticity are the

podcast genre’s commonly described and sought-after qualities. Critic Jonah Weiner

(2014) describes ‘the [podcast] form’s special sense of intimacy’ in the context of an

‘empathic partnership’, which arises partly because ‘we tend to trust voices

instinctively’. Prominent radio/podcast journalist and author John Biewen (2017, p. 2)

concurs: ‘… radio and podcasting boast humanity’s oldest storytelling tool: the

human voice’. Thus it is hardly surprising that among the flurry of podcasts that

would number 350,000 on iTunes by 2016, a growing genre of ‘Personal Journal’

emerged: a form of audio memoir, delivered in first person and other forms, which as

two later case studies will show, can both draw on and depart from journalistic

conventions such as truth, accuracy and objectivity. Maras (2013, p. 1) analyses the

complex history of objectivity in journalism:

For some, objectivity is the cement of good journalism… For others,

objectivity is a kind of deception, obscuring cultural, capitalistic or

national bias behind talk of a neutral point of view; promoting faith in an

external truth or ideal, an individualistic viewing position that doesn’t

exist.

From the 1960s, objectivity in journalism was forcefully challenged by the

emerging movements of Literary Journalism and New Journalism, exemplified by

authors such as Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer. As

Norman Sims, an early scholar of the form, wrote: ‘Unlike standard journalism,

literary journalism demands immersion in complex, difficult subjects. The voice of

the writer surfaces to show readers that an author is at work’ (Sims 1984, p. 2). In the

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ensuing decades, longform narrative journalism that borrows the tools of fiction to

write compelling non-fiction has occupied the pages of magazines from Esquire and

Vanity Fair to Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. It has also recently extended to

American podcasting, in S-Town (2017), a seven-hour exploration of small town

Alabama by journalist Brian Reed and the Serial team that achieves the masterly

evocations of place and character of Capote’s (1965) ‘non-fiction novel’ In cold

blood. Slate’s culture writer, Katy Waldham (2017), called S-Town ‘something more

like aural literature… meanders between Gothic unease and poetic melancholy’, while

US podcast critic Nicholas Quah (2017) overtly alludes to its links to literary

journalism:

S-Town emerges as the latest iteration of what is shaping up to be the

Serial team’s broad principal legacy: how it carries to podcasting the torch

of New Journalism, that blend of reportage and literary technique that

remains honest to how the personal experience of the journalist is

intermingled in the production of a story.

S-Town is an epic work that sits on the spectrum of podcasting-as-literary-

journalism – a genre uncommon in the US but which crafted audio storytelling

features from Europe, Australia and elsewhere have arguably colonized for decades,

as will be seen. Much more common in recent years are talk-driven podcasts that

mirror the steady growth in confessional and personal journalism described by

Rosalind Coward (2013) as originating in the literary journalism movement of the

1960s and 1970s. These hosts often share the concerns of subjectivity which Sims

(1984, p. 3) describes: ‘The new journalists of the 1960s called attention to their own

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voices; they self-consciously returned character, motivation, and voice to nonfiction

writing.’ Where these podcast hosts exhibit characteristics of literary journalism in

order to create an aural memoir, the podcast personal narrative or memoir can thus be

seen as a subset of the literary journalism cultural form. In this essay, I propose that to

understand and critique this proliferating audio memoir form, it is necessary to

examine the unique strengths of the audio medium and the characteristics of audio

storytelling, including those audio feature programs that may be considered a form of

literary journalism (LJ). I will contextualize these factors via two case studies that

show how a curated, slice-of-life story can leverage the power of audio to achieve

unique force as a podcast memoir.

AUDIO as a MEDIUM

Audio is first and foremost a temporal medium. Unlike film, you can’t freeze-

frame it: it only exists in real time. Unlike print, you can’t easily skim a passage

and jump ahead. This perforce listening-in-real-time creates a pact of intimacy

between speaker and listener and an accompanying sense of ‘liveness’ not

found in print. Richard Fidler, who hosts an interview-based podcast that is the

most listened-to podcast in Australia, is a superb exponent of audio’s capacity

for empathy and intimacy. But he also warns that the ‘liveness’ element means

that, as those who write audio scripts know, what is being communicated has to

be understandable in one pass: there is no chance in radio for the listener to

review a passage.1

… radio is much more linear than literature; you can’t expect the listener

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 to go back a few pages and remind themselves that Gisli is the brother of

Thorkel, who is married to Thorgrim, who hates Vestein, who is actually

Gisli’s best friend. (Fidler in Australian audio guide 2017)

Audio encourages revelation. Like print, and unlike video, audio liberates

speakers from being judged on appearance: the overweight, the old, the bald, the

beautiful, are made more equal, while factors such as visible disability or racial origin

can attract less judgment. This encourages interviewees to open up and feel more

comfortable about telling deeply personal stories. Audio is also distinguished by its

portability and porousness. As the seminal media scholar Walter Ong notes: ‘Sight

isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he

views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer’ (Ong 2007, p. 71). Unlike video or

print, which require static attention, audio accompanies us, in the car, in the kitchen,

in our headphones: sound ‘envelops us, pouring into us, whether we want it to or not,

including us, involving us’, notes American radio scholar Susan Douglas (2004, p.

30).

Sound is subjective: as the English media studies theorist Michael Bull and

sociologist Les Back note, ‘Sounds are embedded with both cultural and personal

meanings; sounds do not come at us merely raw’ (Back & Bull 2003, p. 9). Audio

feature makers (and producers of well crafted podcasts) use sound itself to tell a story.

Acclaimed UK audio producer Alan Hall declares, ‘for the [audio] feature maker,

sound – pure sound – is as potent a substance as any carefully weighed word or well-

chosen musical figuration… no sound is innocent’ (Hall in Biewen & Dilworth 2017,

p. 128). Thus, for an audio feature on a returned, chain-smoking Iraqi war veteran and

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musician, Hall uses the sound of a match being struck or a Zippo cigarette lighter

being flicked on, and the accompanying inhalations and exhalations as the veteran

draws on the cigarette, as a leitmotif that pulls the listener towards a subliminal

understanding of the man’s persona.

It became a key understanding of character – not just of Will himself, the

soldier-musician, but of any weary soldier pictured with a cigarette

hanging from his lips. And also of any musician in a smoky jazz club…

Beyond that, this banal sound came to represent something else: the action

of smoking, inhaling and exhaling, came to signal that Will was present,

he was breathing, he was alive – amid the devastation of Baghdad and

New Orleans – and he was taking time out to reflect upon where he had

been, what he had seen, and what now lay before him. (ibid, p.127)

Hall concedes that this ‘metaphoric elevation’ of smoking a cigarette might

not be consciously acknowledged by the listener. But it has been heard and

processed, and in Hall’s view, ‘each association and resonance can be released,

like Proust’s madeleine moment, by the right trigger, the right key’ (ibid,

p.128).

Just as no two readers will envisage a character in fiction in the same way, no two

listeners will have exactly the same mental picture when they hear a sound. But

besides soundtrack and words, the listener has more to go on: they are hearing an

actual voice. Tone, timbre, modulation and accent color the impression those words

make and the listener can also discern something of the speaker’s age, class, regional

provenance. Further meaning is embedded in the non-verbal sound: a gulp, a pause, a

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sharp breath, a quaver, can inflect the moment more powerfully than any phrase. This

was most clearly demonstrated to me in my own experience as both a non-fiction

author and radio documentarian when I interviewed Australian journalist, Jan

Graham, who had spent ten years reporting for wire agencies on the Vietnam War.

Among many horrific events she recounted, one story was almost unbearably moving:

her description of how, when she was ‘embedded’ with a US army unit, she witnessed

a GI step on a mine and instinctively ran to his side, to ‘cuddle him’, as he bled to

death in her arms. In the telling, her emotions seethe and surge behind the at times

faltering, at times angry, voice; she sobs, sniffles, exhales, pauses, regains

momentum, moves from fast, clear recall to dreamy re-enactment of his last moments,

when she was forced to act as the wife he had been going home to, that very day – he

went into shock and thought Jan was her. This act of usurped intimacy still haunted

Jan.

Jan’s account had three iterations: one as three and a half minutes of raw, virtually

unedited audio (McHugh 1993a), and two as print versions of a book (McHugh

1993b, 2005). The loss of impact of her story on the page troubled me. My first print

version was etiolated, leached of power, compared to the audio. I tested this at

conferences and with students: invariably, they rated the print version as having much

less impact - around 40% of the audio. In many cases, the audio impact was visceral:

people cried. When another edition of the book came out, I used white space on the

page to approximate Jan’s speech rhythms, much as would be done with a poem. This

gave it greater force – but nothing could approach the primal gut-punch of listening to

her tortured, tearful account. It was only much later, having researched the affective

power of sound, that I was able to articulate via an audio-print analysis why that was

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so (McHugh 2012). Affect is a quality that has been studied in fields as varied as

neuroscience, psychology and media studies, but it is perhaps most succinctly

described by cultural studies theorist Eric Shouse (2005): ‘affect is what makes

feelings feel.’ Affect is the emotional charge, the mute but transmitted vibe behind

much spoken communication – and the audio medium is a superb vector for it. When

the lure of narrative and finely-tuned scripting for audio is combined with the

affective qualities of sound itself and the highly connective act of listening, as in the

best podcast memoirs, the resulting audio story engenders a profound response. To

unleash the audio medium’s power to the full, it is necessary to understand the

principles of audio storytelling.

The PRINCIPLES of AUDIO STORYTELLING

Film, whether as art house feature, blockbuster, or documentary, uses well recognized

grammar: we are all familiar with flashbacks, voiceover and the impact of varied

camera angles. The best long-form audio narratives have a similar creative logic, but

it is one that is only beginning to be articulated. The anthology, Reality radio: telling

true stories through sound (eds Biewen & Dilworth, 2017), contains essays by noted

international audio producers and podcasters in the Americas, Europe and Australia,

who deconstruct what they do and how they do it. While the latest edition includes

diverse voices such as the Peruvian writer Daniel Alarcón, producer of Spanish-

language Radio ambulante, and Glyn Washington, the African-American host of the

storytelling podcast Snap judgment, most of the contributors originated in the still

overwhelmingly white world of US public radio. Historically, despite exceptional

productions by luminaries such as Norman Corwin and Studs Terkel, this audio sector

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lagged behind Europe and Australia in imaginative non-fiction audio storytelling.

There, with the advent of portable tape recorders in the 1960s, radio producers

escaped the studio to gather found sound and make ‘acoustic films’ (Braun 2004).

These audio feature works could be cerebral and sensory at the same time, triggering

what radio scholar Seán Street calls ‘a partnership between memory and imagination’

(Street 2014a). In the US, National Public Radio (NPR) began adventurously in 1970

before lapsing into a more formulaic current affairs idiom. Then, in 1995, Ira Glass

famously reinvented the genre with what would become This american life (TAL),

returning the focus to personal storytelling and a signature style of studied informality

and vernacular narration – but with a deeper purpose: ‘TAL stories tend to lead to

epiphanies of the sort found in literature…’ (Biewen 2017, p. 7).

Before focusing on individual personal storytelling podcasts, it is instructive to

consider further the core elements of the audio storytelling form. The online journal,

RadioDoc Review (2014), was founded by the author in order to develop critical

analysis and scholarship in this nascent field (McHugh 2014). Its international

editorial board is comprised of acclaimed practitioners and audio scholars, who

nominate audio features from around the world for review. The journal offers

reviewers a framework for analysis – essentially a shortlist of the key characteristics

of effective audio storytelling. These include storytelling strength, originality and

innovation; emotiveness, empathy and audience engagement; depth of research and

complexity of character portrayal; craft, artistry and dramaturgical coherence.

In audio, producers use concepts such as dramaturgy and choreography to

compose with sound in much the same way that a conventional literary journalist

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would employ a ‘chaptered’ narrative structure and detailed, reconstructed scenes and

description. Listen to a Prix Italia winner such as France ARTE Radio’s ‘Qui a

connu Lolita?/Who killed Lolita?’ (Ahoudig, Apprill, Batard 2009), about the

discovery of the bodies of a Cape Verde immigrant and her two children in a

Marseilles apartment, dead from starvation, and you will recognize many LJ tropes:

evocative scenes (not recreated as in LJ, but recorded as audio vérité); multiple voices

and shifting perspectives; a murky mystery whose gripping plot and cinematic sense

of place leaves the listener deeply affected. The Canadian practitioner Chris Brookes

(2015) has mused on how the impressionistic audio feature differs from the more

informationalist audio documentary. In a four-decade career, he has moved past the

rendition of aural reality to probing how layered sound can create a heightened,

imagined form of reality. ‘It is trying to say the unsayable or express the

inexpressible. It is not about the words – it’s about the force fields between the words’

(Brookes in Street 2014, p. 91).

As an example, for the ABC radio series, Minefields and miniskirts, I interviewed

a nurse who had served in the Vietnam War and was officially diagnosed with Post-

Traumatic Stress Disorder. This could be triggered by the sound of helicopters, she

told me; the often horrifically wounded Australian soldiers she treated were rushed in

from the field via helicopter. Around her words, I wanted to place the sounds of

whirring helicopters, to evoke the turmoil in her mind. But recordings of helicopters

of the era sounded strangely unidentifiable. So I worked in studio to layer and mix the

helicopter sounds until they acoustically resembled the way she had described them –

as menacing, insistent rhythms she could not escape. I argue that this aural

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‘reconstruction’ based on interview detail is comparable to the way a literary

journalist such as Capote or Didion builds a scene from research.

Such composition through sound is practiced in diverse ways, but the effect, as

with the best literary journalism, is to immerse the audience in another world. As

Biewen (2017, p. 4) notes, of the best contemporary audio storytellers: ‘These trends

towards the DIY documentary and the self-narrated story are relatively new strategies

in pursuit of an old, old impulse– to explore human experience in all its naked

complexity.’ The next section will consider in detail some of these worlds.

PODCASTS as MEMOIR:

The vaunted intimacy of podcasting is not new. Back in the 1930s, US President

Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his famous radio ‘fireside chats’– presidential

addresses to the nation delivered as though he were speaking individually to everyone

listening at home. As McLuhan (1994, p. 299) noted: ‘That is the immediate aspect of

radio. A private experience.’ This capacity for powerful one-to-one communication

applies perhaps even more strongly to podcasting, given that many people listen via

headphones, so that the podcast host is literally speaking into their ear. This and other

factors, as Lindgren (2016) shows, link the increase in personal narrative journalism

in recent years to the rise in podcasting. Lindgren focuses mainly on personal stories

told to a journalist, who crafts them as narrative – a format widely pursued since the

mid-1990s via models such as This american life and now being reworked by

independent podcast networks such as Radiotopia and Gimlet in the US and Falling

Tree Productions and Somethin’ Else in the UK. Shows such as Heavyweight (2016),

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Criminal (2014) and Short cuts (2012) are good examples of this genre, distinguished

by fine writing and high standards of audio production.

First-person memoir podcasts that are well produced (not just spoken word audio

blogs), are less common. Millennial (2015), in which Asian-American host Megan

Tan examines her own experience of being twenty-something, is one, but by the end

of Season One (ten episodes), she has exhausted the material provided by her own life

and sensibly moved on to reporting about others of her generation. Not by accident

(2016) has a tighter focus. It tells the story of host Sophie Harper’s decision to

become a single mother via IVF – and is disarmingly introduced by three-year-old

Astrid, the result of that decision. Season One telescopes some five years and one

hundred hours of recordings into twenty deeply personal episodes, starting with

Harper’s attendance at an IVF clinic, interwoven with expository narration and scenes

with her family.

This is the biggest story of my life… It is primarily an emotional journey,

contained by the framework of real world events: maternity leave in

Australia, returning to work in Denmark, childcare, balancing work and

single motherhood, isolation from family and friends, moving home to

Australia after six years away… and the impact on my daughter and me of

making this series. (ibid)

Not by accident works best when Harper includes beautifully recorded acoustic

scenes, as she journeys through pregnancy, back in time to her realization that she

was a lesbian, to her close relationship with her parents, sisters and extended family,

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and her colleagues and students in Denmark, where she teaches documentary. In

recording these scenes, Harper encountered the same ethical dilemmas of any

memoirist: how to represent real people fairly yet squarely.

For me, the hardest part has been figuring out how to tell my story with

openness and honesty, without hurting others who were involved in the

events, or damaging relationships. Not everyone wants to be a character in

my story, particularly if my one-sided telling doesn’t make them look

good. I feel I have an ethical responsibility to the subjects, to the audience

and to my own creative vision in making this project. (Harper in

Australian audio guide 2017)

Other recommended programs include ‘Mei Mei, a daughter’s song,’ in which

Dmae Roberts deconstructs the difficult cross-cultural relationship between herself as

an Asian-American woman and her traditional Taiwanese mother (Roberts 1989,

Fukui 2017); and ‘Losing Yourself’ (2016), an episode of John Biewen’s Scene on

Radio podcast in which a young woman records her life following a diagnosis of

leukemia. One unusual trauma memoir-podcast, is ‘Mariya’ (2016) in which a

Pakistani-American woman reflects on being a victim of female genital mutilation. It

began as a written essay and was adapted for audio by a team at The Heart, a

Radiotopia show specializing in gender and sexuality topics. The podcast Radio

Diaries, in which invited subjects keep audio diaries which the producers artfully

craft as narrative, is also notable; stand-out episodes include ‘Thembi’s AIDS Diary’,

a moving story of a young South African woman’s experience of living with AIDS,

and ‘Majd’s Diary’, in which a young Saudi Arabian records how she negotiates

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family, study and matchmaking over a two-year period. Other formats, which may be

considered a performative memoir, include the growing number of live ‘true life’

storytelling events, repackaged as podcasts: The Moth (US, Australia), Confession

Booth (Australia), Spark (UK), to name a few. An episode of Spark (2015) that

featured London sex workers describing their philosophical approach to the job was

by times ribald, enlightening and memorable.

The following analysis considers two shows that offer contrasting first-person

approaches to audio memoir.

Strangers: Love hurts, Episodes 1-4, Lea Thau (Strangers 2014)

Strangers is a podcast from the Radiotopia network, which launched in 2014 as a

network of ‘extraordinary, story-driven podcasts’, co-founded by PRX (Public Radio

Exchange) and the high-profile podcaster Roman Mars, host of 99% Invisible, which

features stories related to design and architecture. Strangers is hosted by Danish-born

Lea Thau, now in her early forties and resident in California. The series, which bills

itself as a show that is ‘a shot of empathy in the arm’, usually tells well wrought

personal stories that feature Thau as sympathetic and empathetic interviewer. In 2014,

she broke the mold to interrogate her own life for a four-part series, Love hurts. The

series focuses on a period in Thau’s recent life when she split up with her partner a

month before the birth of their baby after learning he was having an affair, and was

subsequently single for four years – the first extended time in her adult life she had

been without a partner. Her tone in the opening minutes is open, honest and

conversational:

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 When my ex decided he didn’t want me, it was the first time in my life

that I lost control of the narrative. I went from being engaged to be

married and pregnant and looking for houses every Sunday to being eight

months pregnant, alone in an apartment, discarded and devastated. (Love

hurts 1)

Thau dated men she met online, but no relationships ensued. So for the series, she

decides to ask some of these failed dates why they thought it didn’t work out: a

potentially excruciating encounter with a peculiarly American element of perverse

narcissism, except that Thau is not American, and her savvy self-reflexivity saves the

show from toppling into self-indulgence or masochism. In Episode One, one date,

Robert, now happily in a relationship, tells Thau that it was just poor timing – there

was only a three-week window when he would have been open to a relationship and

she missed it. In Episode Two, Thau runs into another former date, John, at a school

function she is attending with her young son. Two years on, John has met another

woman and they have a child – conceived one month after they met. ‘Long enough to

know that this was a good person, we were both very much in love and there was a

baby that was going to come… we just threw all our chips in the pile and just went for

it,’ says John (Love hurts 2). Thau ruminates on the pros and cons of diving straight

into commitment.

Because the curse of online dating is that we have so many options. It’s

also the beauty of online dating. But like many things in this modern life,

there’s a fine line between the beauty and the fucking curse of it. Most of

us wouldn’t give up all the options we have now; I wouldn’t. But

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 sometimes you can’t help thinking that a tiny dose of necessity or some

kind of external urgency would help us as we waffle our way through

singledom. (Love hurts 2)

In print, this looks banal. As audio, inflected over acoustic musical pauses, and

with emphasis and expressiveness added through voice, along with a self-chiding

laugh as she says ‘fine line’ and ‘fucking curse’, it draws the listener closer. Episode

Three sees Thau talk to two ‘experts’ about her failed attempt to find a relationship.

One, described as ‘a love coach’, milks the vulnerability of single women to sell her

book. It’s hard to listen to, as if you’ve stumbled onto Judge Judy when you were

expecting National Geographic. But Thau deepens it by framing herself as a rookie

interviewee, not used to being questioned rather than questioning, and analyzes her

own frailty in that role. Her recounting of how she feels abandoned and betrayed as

she is about to give birth is genuinely moving and she is clear-eyed about her naïve

expectations of her former partner. Episode Four features Joe, a man Thau rejected –

who is interviewed by her on this topic at his request. She begins the episode by

addressing head-on the premise of turning the spotlight on her own life:

Welcome to Strangers… I’m Lea Thau - and if you’re sick of hearing

about me, you can just turn this off. I’m a bit sick of talking about myself,

so I get it. And I’ve been on the fence about whether I should do this final

installment of Love hurts, because there have been some angry iTunes

reviews, saying ‘enough with the most pathetic love life already – this is

unlistenable!’ And you know, they do sting. But for every one of those,

there have been hundreds of comments, saying I’m in Mumbai, I’m in

17
 Sweden, I’m in Wisconsin: thank you for making me feel less alone.

(Love hurts 4)

In fact, Thau received so many messages related to Love hurts that she created a

follow-up program from the voicemails – a meta-commentary on her own experience

and surely one of the more interesting differences between memoir as a written

publication and memoir as an online experience to which listeners can respond and

even become part of. Three years on, Strangers has 185 ratings on iTunes, of which

180 are the maximum five stars, four are four stars and one rates it three, complaining

of ‘far too much moralising and commentary tacked on’. There is no sign of angry

comments; on the contrary, the reviews consistently praise Thau’s friendliness and

seductive storytelling. It is probably significant that Thau had built a strong host

relationship with listeners before she turned to her own story.

As an autobiographical slice-of-life series, Love hurts is at times cringe-inducing;

but it retreats from being a public self-mortification due to Thau’s insight into her

own situation and her jolts of self-deprecating observation. ‘I can’t believe I’m doing

this,’ she tells us, as she goes to see Robert. The intimacy and empathy potential of

the podcast genre buttress Thau’s skilful writing and her raspy, lived-in voice adds

credibility and warmth. Though it does not display complex production, and is mostly

based around voice rather than sound-rich storytelling, it is well crafted, with adept

use of music as punctuation and mood-setter. Following the series, Strangers reverted

to non-memoiresque shows – until 2016, when Thau introduced the new man in her

life and informed listeners that they were considering moving in together with their

18
respective children, and even getting married. At that point, this listener did feel like

tapping Thau on the shoulder and giving some gentle advice: switch off the mike.

‘When I grow up’: David Holthouse. Audio memoir, part of ‘Slow to react’,

Episode 425, This american life (Holthouse 2011)

This 23-minute audio memoir formed part of an episode of This american life themed

around people who had belatedly taken action following significant events in their

life: hence the title, ‘Slow to react’. The narrator and writer, David Holthouse, opens

thus:

This time last year I was plotting to kill a man. This time last year I had a

gun, and a silencer, and a plan. I had staked out the man's tract home in

the Denver suburbs. I had followed him to and from his job in a high tech

office park. I was confident I would get away with murder because there

was nothing in recent history to connect me to him. Homicide

investigators look for motive and mine was buried 25 years in the past.

The man I was going to kill was the one who raped me in 1978 when I

was seven years old. (Holthouse 2011)

The story continues as tautly and tensely as it opens. It reveals how the teenage

son of Holthouse’s parents’ best friends had violently raped him one evening while

his parents played cribbage and drank wine upstairs. Over the next 25 years,

Holthouse had dreamed of revenge and tortured himself with fears that as part of the

19
‘vicious cycle’ theory of pedophilia, he too would molest children. He could not bring

himself to tell his parents, considering suicide instead, staged to look like an accident,

to spare their feelings. In his early thirties, working as a journalist, he finds that his

attacker is living nearby and plots his murder. Then fate intervenes, when his mother

discovers his childhood diary entry.

If you have a secret you want to keep, never write it down. I know that

now, but I didn't when I was ten, the summer between fourth and fifth

grade when I sat down with a pen in my Garfield the cat diary. The entry

is dated June 1981. And while I have no memory of writing it, the

penmanship is unmistakably my own. There between accounts of my

grandfather dying and a game-winning double I hit in little league is an

account of my being raped three years before.

Taken by surprise, Holthouse confirms what happened to his mother. She rings

the perpetrator’s parents and reads out a statement, advising them to keep their son

away from children – by now he has his own. Holthouse narrates in a bald, flattened

style that suits the Chandleresque noir style of his writing. The only accompaniment

to his voice is music, which is faded in and out at key points, to underline, or allow a

section to sink in, as happens following the account of his mother’s call:

She told them that she wished them to have good lives, but to never

contact her or my father again. No Christmas cards, nothing. She told him

she hoped their son eventually got caught and spent the rest of his life

getting raped in prison. Then she hung up.

20
 The denouement occurs when Holthouse writes to his attacker and demands a

meeting. Again, the writing is stark and vernacular, the narration bloodless and

uninflected.

He showed up wearing jeans, a grey t-shirt, and a Colorado Avalanche

cap. When I saw him standing on the corner anxiously trying to pick me

out of the crowd, I realized the moment I had written about in my diary in

1981 had arrived. We were both grown men and I was meeting him on the

street.

I didn't punch him in the face. I did shake his hand. But neither of us

pretended that nothing had happened. We were afraid of one another. I

was so jacked up on adrenaline I was shaking. He was sweating like he'd

just run a mile. ‘Nervous,’ he said. I nodded. ‘Me too,’ he said.

The liberation for Holthouse is that in facing up to his tormentor, he loses the need

for physical revenge.

As a slice-of-life audio story, ‘When I grow up’ is powerful indeed. But it turns

out it was written seven years earlier under the title ‘Stalking the bogeyman’

(Holthouse 2004) for an Alaskan newspaper, Westword, where Holthouse was then

employed. The texts of ‘Stalking the bogeyman’ and ‘When I grow up’ are about 80-

90% identical. Holthouse’s stripped-back, conversational writing style translates

almost seamlessly to audio, but some changes have been made in deference to This

21
american life’s public radio audience. A graphic description of the rape is excised,

along with confronting details of the assailant torturing a cat. Other descriptions are

omitted or toned down; even the mild term ‘dogshit’ is bleeped. In keeping with

audio’s need for economic writing that can be understood at one hearing, some

sections are cut back and/or rewritten more plainly. Unanswered questions raised by

the newspaper article are addressed in the TAL version, such as when Holthouse

meets his assailant in a ‘cheap-suit department store’ when he is 21. In both versions,

we learn that Holthouse does nothing, because he is with his mother. In the audio

version, we get vital additional information on how the rapist reacts to being in the

company of his now adult victim: ‘the bogeyman gave a weak smile and made small

talk with my mom while I was pretending to look at cuff links on the other side of the

store.’

But while the story is tighter in some ways as audio, it does not achieve its full

potential. To conform to TAL’s three-act formula around a theme (‘slow to react’), it

sits weirdly alongside a chirpy prologue about a woman who does not realize she is

pregnant until she goes into labor, and is followed by a story of romantic love and of

surviving cancer. Host Ira Glass back-announces the Holthouse piece with almost

indecent haste; classic audio production technique would let music run on after

Holthouse’s last words for at least a phrase or two, to allow the whole story to settle

and sink in. The use of music throughout is underwhelming and formulaic: Glass

(2016) has clearly described the role he wants music to play in This american life,

introducing it to signify ‘rising action’ and using it as a bridge to allow the text to

‘breathe’ – to signify a paragraph or chapter change in the story. This is standard; but

the actual music used could have had a subtler and more potent effect in setting and

22
reflecting mood, as is expertly done in the TAL spin-off, S-Town. Further, the audio

treatment of a high-action, deeply emotive narrative such as this would have benefited

from the ‘imagined reality’ of Brookes, a more creative literary journalism approach

that could, for instance, have taken us inside the frightened child’s head;

counterpointed the incongruity of social banter happening alongside the vicious rape

scene below; explored Holthouse’s later risk-taking behavior (he goes mountain

climbing alone and without ropes, as a kind of death wish); and let our ears linger on

the emotionally explosive moment when Holthouse’s mother confronts the rapist’s

parents.

Holthouse may have felt these frustrations. He revisited the story for theatre. In

2014, his play, ‘Stalking the bogeyman’ became a New York Times Critic’s Pick. In

the UK, The Guardian (Gardner 2016) was less positive: ‘Three scenes have real

power, in particular David’s mother’s phone call to the parents of the rapist, but the

characters are sketchily drawn and we never get sufficiently inside David’s head.’ In

the right hands, getting inside David’s head is exactly what a creative audio feature

treatment could do for this memoir.

CONCLUSION

This article has demonstrated that well produced audio formats, delivered as podcasts,

offer strong potential for autobiographical storytelling and memoir. Numerous other

examples can be found in the ‘Personal Journals’ category in iTunes and on other

podcast platforms. The trend to tell personal stories for an audio medium so as to

capture its affective force and ability to stimulate the imagination continues to grow:

23
the introduction in 2017 of a ‘Personal Lives’ category to the New York Radio

Festival international awards is one manifestation of this. Lea Thau’s ‘Love hurts’

series on her podcast Strangers illustrates how podcasting can enable aural memoir as

a form that deliberately dissociates itself from the restrictions of mainstream

journalism. As Thau notes:

I’m just me. This is MY podcast; it’s not representing any institutions.

This is not NPR, where you have to be fair and balanced. It’s not

journalism in that sense; it’s my show and if you don’t like it, you can just

not tune in. And so you have a bit more license to give your own opinions,

whether they be political or personal, and share your own stories. But I

also think you have to do that to a degree because people expect that in

this medium. (Thau in Rosenthal 2014)

Holthouse’s ‘When I grow up’, on the other hand, demonstrates how an aural

memoir can exploit key characteristics of longform narrative journalism, described by

Ricketson (2014, p. 243) as an account that ‘incorporates facts, atmosphere, emotions,

context, texture and meaning’. Holthouse’s print version of his experiences, ‘Stalking

the bogeyman’, does not elicit elements such as atmosphere, emotions and texture as

effectively as the audio format, because of the audio medium’s stronger affective

capacity and its use of layered sound and temporality to enhance meaning. However

both versions espouse literary journalism motifs in service of memoir, by drawing on

‘elements of literary practice that are customarily associated with but not owned by

fiction, such as characterisation, dialogue, scene-setting and authorial voice…’ (ibid).

24
 In the past, the appeal of audio memoirs was limited by the ephemerality of radio,

but podcasting has changed that. A podcast is at least as permanent as an e-book. It

provides an excellent vehicle for the audio memoir, where sound can be ‘a kind of

portal through which a deeper, often inarticulate consciousness can be glimpsed’

(Hall in Biewen & Dilworth 2017, p. 129). If voice is the most compelling aspect of

memoir, the podcast memoir lets us hear that voice with naked clarity, narrating its

life story straight into our ears.

25
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ENDNOTE:

1
While podcasts allow the ability to rewind and even speed-listen, there is scant research on how much

CHAPTER CITATION:

34

CITATION:

McHugh, Siobhan, “Memoir for Your Ears: The Podcast Life”, in Mediating Memory: tracing
the limits of memoir, Avieson, B., Giles, F. & Joseph S. (eds), Routledge: Oxford, New York
(2018), pp 104-122.

NOTE: This is a research copy only - check book for accurate page numbers.

35

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