"Thank You For Listening"

[fiefoe]

Julia Whelan included enough inside info on how audiobooks are made to make me satisfied, but the AI narrator is this giant dark cloud that looms even after the HEA.

• Because this is how it actually goes.
  A stunningly average woman the wrong side of thirty on her way to Vegas, wearing an eye patch, sitting in a broken seat, listening to porn.
• Adaku’s hugs always began with swaying, moved into meditative stillness, and ended with deep yoga breathing. The girl knew how to stay in the moment. Even if it was only for a moment.
• Sewanee hadn’t known then how quickly a dream could become a thing that mocked you.
• She had let her activity lapse after the accident. Too many sympathy posts and then, seemingly overnight, not enough.
• The explicit nature of these books led many narrators–much like the books’ authors–to use pseudonyms. It was an industry norm and everyone had his or her own reasons for doing so but, like a society of magicians, they were all sworn to secrecy.
• Sewanee could take comfort, later, in the fact that her first impulse, her instinct, had been happiness and not a finger-snap of jealousy. The smile that happened was real, the shout that erupted from her was genuine, the tears that followed were joyful. They giggled and they cried and it was impossible to tell, after a certain point, which was which. A wintry mix of emotions.
• She looked out into the silent crowd, what she’d said settling over the auditorium like suffocating ash from a volcano.
• Blah clucked her tongue. “Christ on a crutch, you just said that. I swear, this old tackle box of a head is nothing more than tangled up lines, lures, and sinkers. Getting old is for the goddamn birds.”
• “Cover up whatever you please for the world, but in intimacy? Hide nothing. In intimacy, everything is beautiful. So, what do you do?” <> Sewanee didn’t hear the question. That is, she heard individual words that formed a question, but she didn’t hear what was asked. It came to her on a delay.
• Sewanee unconsciously licked her lips. “Well. To assuage your curiosity? I am and I don’t.” The retort flowed from her as smoothly as the wine from the decanter. <> Nick stilled, untangling her comeback.
• a produce bin consisting entirely of the audiobook narrator’s secret antidote to mouth noise: green apples. No one knew why they worked (Acidity? Tannins?), but they did.
• Tonight, there was a marine layer on the west side and a little smog on this side of town, so the sunset was less a bowl of bright sherbet and more a slowly expanding puddle of spilled strawberry milk shake.
• “She used to look half-decent, now she looks indecent.” Blah’s humor was a remarkable holdout of her dwindling acuity
• Her words hung in the air, a cluster of balloons waiting to be gathered up. But Henry let them drift...
  “I would think you’d have learned that.”
  Pop.
  Then, to himself: “I swear, talking to you is like talking to her.”
  And pop.
  Now that her balloons no longer hung between them, she saw him clearly, even if nothing was, in fact, clear.
• “You too,” she said, then followed the lie with an unwritten law of Hollywood interactions: the stated recognition of an actor’s success. “Tommy Callahan.”
• He wasn’t aging gracefully, was he? He wasn’t getting craggy or jagged or crinkly; he was getting blurry.
• Reliving the night had made it real, concretized it. It was now a story, one that had been shared with another person, open to scrutiny, available for opinion. Outside of her head it became . . . a lot. Maybe it was something to regret.
• Heat blasted from his vocal furnace.
• BROCK:
  You’ve obviously been out of the Romance game for a while. MW recently added air-ee-OH-luh as an official alt pronunciation.
• I think he’s tired of being seen as this sex god. I think he’s desperate to end the performance, but who is he without it?
• Which was why, she realized, she could identify with Brock much more than with someone like Nick.
  Nick.
  The man who always went ’round the bend, who would look into the well even if it meant crushing disappointment. Nick was who she wished she were; Brock was much closer to who she actually was.
  It was as if she had been staring at a painting and foreground-Nick and background-Brock had switched. When had that happened?
• Her heaving. His trembling. How they slowly slalomed back to earth like leaves.
  Consciousness returned the way a sunrise returned light to the earth. A moan, a sigh, a shudder, a laugh, an apology, an are you kidding, a promise to go slow next time, a so long as next time is right the fuck now, a chuckle, a disentangling, an unhitching, a Jaysus, you regressed me, a strangled right back atcha.
  A step away.
  A good stare.
  A swallow.
  Another.
  A step forward.
  A kiss.
  More.
• Nick was the first to speak. What he said was, “Holy mother of shite.”
  Sewanee had a whole dump truck of things to say, but the hydraulics were broken.
• The fact that he found this funny seemed to prove he wasn’t nearly as invested in either version of her as she’d been in both versions of him.
• “You have got to get some sleep,” she groaned out loud, parenting herself.
• Sewanee choked down the last of the burrito. “Missing arm beats out missing eye.” She snapped her fingers sardonically. “Every time.” <> Adaku shook her head. “You gotta stop. It’s about followers. She has like forty million followers. You think talent used to take a backseat? Now it’s in the trunk.
• But the other part kept looping through the unfairness of all the shitty things that had happened and her inability to accept them because they never should have happened in the first place. Not to her. She had never thought, not once, poor me; but she could never escape thinking, why me?
• Pick a flaw, any flaw. Clock it at the beginning. Let it stalk the character in the middle. Then it pounces. The ensuing moment of fight or flight. You’ve done your job. Don’t overcomplicate this. –June French in Cosmopolitan
• Marilyn waved her napkin in front of her face, a surrender. She tried, valiantly, to say, “I’m sorry,” but the words tumbled around in her laughter like sneakers in a dryer.
• Your father has never felt appreciated. The male code word for feeling loved. And sadly, Henry is a man who always found love to be a question, never an answer.
• “We had a good life together. Life is never one thing. But I think I was his consolation prize. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, Swanling: never be a consolation prize.”
• I think everyone around you is waiting for you to accept yourself as you are now, so we can as well. And the bitch of it is you’re waiting for everyone to accept you as you are now so you can accept yourself and, sorry, but love, it’s your move. You’ve gotta go first.”
• They turned left, made a sharp right, walked down a street that was narrower than a hallway, down a flight of tiny steps, under some arbitrary and beautiful wood beams, and there they were: back at the pensione’s garden gate.
• This is how he would be on a Sunday morning when he was long past trying to impress a woman. He was alluring in a suit, he was devastating in a tux, but he was dangerous like this.
• He explained, at normal volume, “I can’t get up until you accept my apology.”
  “What?”
  “I promised Mark,” he mumbled into the ground. “He needs video proof.”
• Not what she’d expected. She’d thought they’d immediately start exhuming their relationship, sorting what was truth from what was fiction. To go back to the beginning and dig themselves out. But, really, what was more formative than family?
• I can tell you you’re everything that keeps me up at night and everything I daydream about and how that makes you feel might last a day or a week or an hour. Feelings are temporary. They stick around as long as you believe in them and then they’re gone, waiting to be believed in again. If they were permanent, then we’d only have to say I love you once and be done with it for the rest of our lives.”
• Sewanee stifled a laugh, going back to her tablet, scrolling the text, plotting, charting, quick-gaming her performance the way an architect might scan blueprints.
• This was the sort of section where Brock McNight shone, all by his lonesome, setting the scene. The undressing, the worship, the interiority of a hero’s desire.
• This fight had begun because she’d pointed out a separation in him, and he retaliated by pointing out a similar divide in her. But the defensive heat went out of the argument when they had–as Henry might have said–brought in textual evidence to support their claims. By highlighting what June had done, they were now looking at themselves instead of each other.
• “Eventually, don’t know when, but eventually? You’re gonna have to stop thinking you’re nothing more than the damaged version of yourself.”
• Nick dropped into his dead-on Stu impression–“it probably wasn’t Emerson anyway, it was probably some bumper sticker writer and no one should take advice from a bumper sticker, or a has-been sneaker-maker for that matter, and did I happen to notice how each wine came in a different-shaped glass at dinner?”
  Sewanee laughed, then, imitating her mom, said, “Stuuuuu.”
• “Because we don’t feel real to me. It feels like we fell out of a Romance tree and hit every trope on the way down.”
  He laughed. “Snowed In.”
  “Just One Night.”
  “Epistolary.”
  “Mistaken Identity.”
  “Love Triangle.”
  She chuckled. “For a minute.”
  “I think that means we’re on to Second Chance, no?”
• They fell into each other and held on as if they were floating. Neither needing the other for saving, both able to swim, but resting on each other for a moment, catching their breath.
  When they separated, Sewanee pointed at her eye patch, then at her friend’s bandage. “Twinsies!”
• “This is a fucked business, Swan. Nobody cares. It’s about nothing but money, power, the special treatment. We didn’t get it at the time, but remember our big goal? Make a million before we’re thirty-five? It wasn’t about art, or talent, or being someone in this world. It was about being something. A commodity. Something that would one day be worth a million dollars.”