“The places, people and events in this book are real. I haven’t invented a thing,” explains Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991) early in Family Lexicon (Tantor Media, 8 hours and 49 minutes). Published in 1963 as an autobiographical novel, the current audio, adeptly narrated by Suzanne Toren, is the version translated by novelist Jenny McPhee and issued in 2017. It received a starred review in this publication and raves elsewhere. The book begins with the author’s family life in Turin before World War II: her bombastic scientist father, constantly shouting everyone down with his familiar catchphrases; her gentle mother and four older siblings, each getting married and leaving home over their father’s objections; her own marriage to the anti-Fascist Leone Ginzburg. As war closes in, family life continues against a darker background: Her mother brings clean clothes to her father in jail; Natalia shepherds her two children to the countryside to be near their father in exile. Ginzburg’s theme is a timely one: a focus on treasured memories and everyday domestic ritual is a comfort in rocky times.
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Phil Hanley is a former Armani runway model and popular stand-up comedian who, despite the challenge of severe dyslexia, has written an excellent memoir and reads it aloud himself. The audiobook of Spellbound: My Life as a Dyslexic Wordsmith (Macmillan Audio, 7 hours and 37 minutes) preserves some of the bloopers and practice reads, interleaving them between chapters to give an ongoing sense of the uniquely arduous process. Hanley grew up in Oshawa, a small town outside Toronto, where he was often humiliated, even by schoolteachers; his mother emerges as the hero of his life, making it possible for him to emerge from childhood with the self-esteem to pursue his dreams. Ultimately, he discovers several more saving graces: LSD, the Grateful Dead, and Transcendental Meditation, each embraced with obsessive enthusiasm. His childhood friend, future supermodel Shalom Harlow, helps him get started in a modeling career, and the story of his year in Milan, living in a boardinghouse full of aspiring male models, is great fun. Hanley has an important story to tell about learning disabilities, and he tells it with passion and candor.
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The question of whether or not Joan Didion’s psychotherapy journal should have been published is now moot, as you can listen to Julianne Moore read it aloud—though I don’t recommend it. The material in Notes to John (Penguin Random House Audio, 6 hours and 32 minutes) was never intended to be part of her literary oeuvre, and since it mostly focuses on her tortured relationship with daughter Quintana, who struggled with alcoholism, it feels like a double violation. A better choice for Didionphiles is Alissa Wilkinson’s We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine (Highbridge, 8 hours and 16 minutes), read by the author, an analysis of Didion’s development as a writer in the context of the movies that shaped her, including the ones she and husband John Gregory Dunne worked on themselves. Although Wilkinson includes biographical details, her focus is on the films and on Didion’s work, from the earliest essays through the novels and later nonfiction, adding to our understanding of why Didion is such a pivotal figure rather than demeaning her with prurient revelations. A film critic for the New York Times, Wilkinson writes insightfully about literature, arguing that the 1984 novel Democracy is Didion’s fictional masterpiece.
Marion Winik, author of The Big Book of the Dead, hosts the Weekly Reader podcast on NPR.
