Conversations Between Friends: Nicole Haroutunian and Apryl Lee
When I signed the contract to publish my novel-in-stories, Choose This Now, with Noemi Press, I asked to include a clause that the press would make a “good faith effort” to publish it as an audiobook too. They’d never produced an audiobook before, but the clause was important to me not only for accessibility reasons, but also because so many people prefer to consume their books in that format. True to her word, Sarah Gzemski at Noemi did extensive research and discovered that, for a small press, the usual audiobook channels were prohibitively expensive. When she asked if we should try to do it ourselves, I offered a counter suggestion: what if we turned to my friend, writer and voice actor, Apryl Lee?
Before long, Apryl had signed on to record and produce the audiobook. Beyond her experience, she was a natural choice for the project for a whole host of other reasons too. She’s been intimately familiar with my writing since we met eighteen years ago in our first MFA workshop at Sarah Lawrence College, and she remains one of my go-to readers, giving me some of the earliest feedback on the manuscript that became Choose This Now. We are also both from New Jersey, as are some of my characters, so her accent was on point. Because she’s writing a book that has a lot of similarities to mine, she understood the structure and my approach to storytelling from the inside out. In discussing the project with her, I was struck by how, from voice to point of view to tense, every choice I made as a writer led to a choice she had to make as an actor. It was thrilling for me to embark on this project with her, and I’m grateful she sat down to talk through the craft and logistics of the process with me.
—Nicole Haroutunian
Nicole Haroutunian: Hi, Apryl! You trained to become a voice actor during the pandemic. What led to that decision?
Apryl Lee: Hi! Voice acting was something I had wanted to try for a while. Acting and performance have always been a part of my life. I did theater throughout college. So, after years of being creative in other ways, not flexing that theater muscle, I really wanted to get back to it. But as a mother and partner, I didn’t want to be out of the house for auditions or rehearsals. So voice acting, a thing I could do at home, seemed perfect. As a fiction writer, I was particularly interested in audiobook narration, as opposed to, say, commercial voice-over work. Then, of course, the pandemic came, and I found myself with some time. I took virtual classes and trained and practiced. But after a year, I lost momentum. And then your book came along!
NH: So many listeners have shared how much they loved your narration; no one would ever guess Choose This Now was your first audiobook. You both read and produced it. Can you share the step-by-step of how that went?
AL: It’s a marathon! And because your project was my first audiobook, there was a bit of a learning curve. I first read the book and took notes about character and intention. I was lucky to have been an early reader of so much of this book, and of course just knowing you and your work over so many years, I knew these characters so well. Most narrators don’t get that privilege. I feel fortunate, too, that I had a very direct line to you, the author of the book. So after talking with you about my thoughts and questions, clarifying things like pronunciation, character tone, and accents, I got to work recording in my DIY home studio. That was the part I loved most: spending hours alone in a sound-dampened space, reading out loud to no one. Kind of a booklover’s dream, maybe? After recording was complete, I listened to the whole book for errors and omissions, places where the narration just lost energy or where I knew I could do better. Then I rerecorded, edited, and mastered. That all may sound pretty linear, but it was a lot of trial and some error—a lot of “building the plane” as I was flying it.
NH: Choose This Now has two main protagonists, Valerie and Taline, who narrate their stories in the first person. They’re very similar to each other. Something that really made me think—and laugh—was when you asked me to compare them to actors so you could get a sense of how I imagined them. I didn’t necessarily offer a useful response, so you wound up pegging them to characters in the show Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which is totally delightful. How did this help you?
AL: You definitely offered a useful response! For the character of Valerie, you suggested Elisabeth Moss and that was funny, because you were thinking of her in The Handmaid’s Tale, pre-authoritarian regime, and I was thinking of her as Peggy Olson from Mad Men. So, initially, Elisabeth Moss inspired the voice of Valerie, or at least my understanding of her responses and intentions. But I found that Valerie as Elisabeth Moss was not as audibly distinct when I listened back to the recording. My family and I just happened to be watching the sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and, like any great sitcom, there were such clearly defined characters, but more so, I felt their personalities came through in their voices.
I tried to differentiate between characters through their pitch, tone, and speed. For example, Valerie is narrated with a smile that creates more of an overall positive tone, but also makes Valerie sound a little naïve, a little hopeful. Even when terrible things are happening, her inflection tends to go up at the end of sentences. I thought that type of lilt was perfect for Valerie. (And if you know Brooklyn Nine-Nine, she was modeled after Melissa Fumero’s character Amy Santiago.)
As for narrating Taline, I began with a purposely disaffected tone, taking inspiration from Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s character of Rosa Diaz, played by Stephanie Beatriz. But, when I reviewed the audio, that choice seemed too cynical and too difficult to express any happiness or joy without losing that tone. So I ended up using my natural speaking voice. Having the women of Brooklyn Nine-Nine assigned to the characters in Choose This Now helped to differentiate them for me in my mind as I was performing and hopefully this differentiation carries over for listeners.
Choose This Now is, among other things, a book about best friends, and I think in real life we often sound very similar to our best friends, maybe because we gravitate to those we see ourselves, our voices, reflected in. They are perhaps different versions of ourselves. Valerie and Taline are a pair, so it makes sense that they sound similar on the page and in the audiobook. And audiences are smart, readers are smart, they don’t need huge cues for character change.
NH: I was really scared that the book wasn’t going to work because the two protagonists’ voices were too similar. As much as I tried, I couldn’t separate them further without each of them diverging from the women I knew them to be. At first, I thought this lack of differentiation was my failing as a writer, like, I’m not good enough to write a character who isn’t based on myself to the extent that they all seem like the same person. It was so helpful to me when you pointed out that the men in the book are all very distinct, both from the women and from each other. And the kids and teenagers have their own appropriate, idiosyncratic voices, as do the secondary protagonists that pop up in a few story-chapters. I learned that I can, in fact, write characters other than myself. Hearing you talk about your process of conveying Valerie and Taline’s voices makes me realize that there are real, deeper reasons why I was resistant to changing them, why their voices are similar, and why I was hopefully right to stay true to my original vision for them.
Someone who is different from them is the character of Céleste. I note in the text that she has a strong French accent: “Her sentences have so many z’s in them, sometimes she sounds like a cartoon of a French person.” But we decided that you shouldn’t do a French accent, even when reading her dialogue. To me, if you were going to do her accent, then you’d have to use a creaky voice for the grandmother, deepen your tone for the men, and get squeaky for the toddlers. A little Frenchness did creep in, though. Can you talk about how you settled on Céleste’s voice and some of the other French, or French-adjacent words, I slipped into the book?
AL: Well, it feels strange—and can be inappropriate—for me to try to speak with an accent that is not mine. Thank you for not wanting me to speak all her lines with a French accent. I don’t think anyone would have been pleased to hear me do that.
Céleste was just written so well. She has a whole vibe going on. She’s beautiful, put-together, unbothered, direct even in the worst moments of her life. So I tried to have those qualities come through in her voice and of course, she needed to sound a little different from the narrator of that story, so I chose a slower cadence and a lower pitch—it just became kind of French-sounding. Also, because, as you noted, you included a direct mention of the way in which Céleste spoke, I thought it was best to try to emulate that idea so that the listener didn’t get confused, or even forget that she was French, which was important, because one key line in the story absolutely needed to be said with a French accent. So, if she seemed French from the start in attitude and tone, when she says that line with a French accent, the shift wouldn’t be jarring or weird for the listener.
It’s funny how many French words ended up in this book—unrelated to the character who is French. I thought the ballet terms were easy enough. But oddly, I had a hard time saying the word croissant. I first said it with a French accent—qua-sant—but felt like that sounded silly, because I am not French, nor was the story’s narrator who was saying the word. So I settled on an American pronunciation—cruh-sant—which is not wrong, but also not how I have ever said that word in my life! There were a few takes involved there.
NH: Can you also share some of the particular challenges you faced in recording the dialogue in the book? I don’t always use dialogue tags; there are visual ways to keep dialogue attributions clear on the page that I understand now don’t come through when read aloud.
AL: I think the format of your dialogue created a fun challenge in narrating this book. There are a couple scenes across the book in which more than two women are in the same room speaking in dialogue and there is a first-person female narrator whose voice I also needed to perform. So it was an extra challenge to keep all three voices separate. The only way I could get through those scenes was to go slowly, pause recording often to regroup and find those characters’ again, and of course, just keep recording until I got it.
The trickiest story in this respect was “Shallow Latch.” As you know, it is written in first person, present tense, and involves three women talking together in a room. Additionally, there is a flashback that the first-person narrator—Valerie—remembers. The flashback is partially in scene with the dialogue of one of the other characters who is presently in the room—Louise. So the choice I had to make as a performer was: Whose voice should Louise’s dialogue be in flashback? Should it be Louise’s voice? Valerie’s? I chose to have it come from Valerie’s voice. It was her flashback, her thoughts. Was that the right choice? I don’t know. So that’s something that pleasantly surprised me about audiobook narration, how the craft choices an author makes play so heavily into the performance. I don’t know if narrators who aren’t writers think this intensely about such things, but I loved it.
NH: Questions around voice come up in terms of conveying humor in the book too. When I’ve read passages of my book aloud at events, I’m aware of the points where the audience laughs. I think I unintentionally play up some subtle humor when I’m in front of a crowd to make the experience more entertaining for them. Your approach to humor in the book was different. Can you talk about that?
AL: I think it all comes down to tense and point of view. In Choose This Now, most of the stories are told in first person, present tense. So the things that seem funny to a reader or listener aren’t necessarily going to be funny to the character who is telling the story in the moment. Humor more often comes with distance and/or retrospect. Even the stories in this book that are written in third person are also in present tense, so there’s not a lot of distance for even a story’s narrator to find humor.
There is also a difference between you reading for a live audience and me reading for an audiobook listener. Your audience is there to hear the author reading her book, and I think you, the author, are another character in that scenario, and that the reading can become interactive. If an audience is immediately responding to the book, you might change your performance to keep the laughter going, or you might smile at them, or even laugh along.
I think my role as an audiobook narrator is to make the audience believe that I’m strictly a character in the book or the teller of the story. There are things that I played a little funny in more subtle ways through auditory nods to the listener—pauses, snark, breaths, scoffs—but I only have the words I’m reading, and I have to stay in character.
NH: I remember you mentioned that the structure of the book made the recording a little easier in terms of not having to stay in character, the same character, for extended periods of time.
AL: Because this book is a novel-in-stories, each “chapter” is complete. There are no consecutive stories with the same character narrating, and each chapter jumps ahead in time. So, for me as the performer, it was nice to be able to walk away from that chapter at the end of a recording session. I didn’t need to get back in the moment or pick up the energy from the previous story.
I really like the way this book handles the passage of time, leaving it up to readers to fill in the blanks. I think there’s a lot of freedom in this form, the freedom to feel complete with one story and then move on to a new arc.
I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about writing a novel-in-stories? What do you think defines it? What made you choose this form for these characters?
NH: I understand novels-in-stories as books in which each chapter is a stand-alone story but, taken together, the stories form a larger arc. For me, this structure feels natural. I’m a short story writer at heart, but I do like staying in the same world over a long period of time, revisiting characters and themes, and making the reader work a little bit to find all the connections. As a reader, I love doing that kind of work, feeling in partnership with the writer.
Part of my attraction to this structure, too, is that I often need to trick myself to start writing. I have a running list of snippets, artworks, ideas, or images that snag my interest; one way I’m able to tackle the blank page is to pick two unrelated bullet points from that list and try to write my way from one to the other. In the story “Parched,” for example, it was the Texas ghost town of Terlingua and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s artwork “Untitled” (Toronto). The next time I wanted to kick-start a new story, I looked back at that one and thought, so what’s changed for that character, Taline, two years later? That jump in time put her in 2016. Like I’d been pregnant during the Trump/Clinton election season, I decided Taline would be too. I made a list of artworks that I associated with that period in my own life, starting with David Hammons’s Pray for America and the nineteenth-century posthumous portraits in an exhibition called Securing the Shadow that had been on view at the American Folk Art Museum, and gave myself the challenge of making those artworks as vital to Taline’s life—or even more vital—than they were to mine. As you point out, though, her next chapter wasn’t the next one in the book—I imagine that she was off living her life for a few years while other characters took the spotlight, then the reader gets to look back in at what’s going on with her fifty or sixty pages later. I love that sense of expansiveness that can happen off the page in a novel-in-stories.
So much of these recording considerations run parallel to what we might think about when we’re writing too. What similarities or parallels do you find between voice-acting and writing? Are there benefits or detriments to being a writer yourself when working on recording an audiobook?
AL: I think that the parallels can be both benefits and detriments! Certainly, the task of finding different voices for characters is something I think about a lot in my writing since I also tend to write stories with several different women characters. As we already discussed, I didn’t separate them in any over-the-top way as I recorded. So that made me think that as a writer, maybe differentiation doesn’t matter as much as conventional writing advice might say it does. Also, I spent a lot of time deeply thinking about tense, point of view, and narratorial distance and their influences on meaning, as I do in my writing. It surprised me how much these craft considerations play into an audiobook performance.
What is it like to hear your book read in a way that you might not have heard it in your mind?
NH: I’ve been a museum educator for twenty years. I spend hours every week making meaning around artwork through conversation, activities, and even silence. It is abundantly clear to me that when artwork leaves an artist’s hands, it belongs to the audience. Intention does matter; it shapes the work, it can provide context, and it can be really interesting. But one of the magical aspects of my job is seeing how broad, varied, and unexpected responses can be to the same artwork. I am constantly exclaiming things like, “I’ve looked at this painting for hours—for years!—and I never noticed that about it!” I think sometimes people feel like I’m humoring them or exaggerating my enthusiasm, but it’s genuine: I get that excited about people interpreting other people’s art. So imagine what it was like for me to hear you read mine! It was like a window into at least one reader’s experience in real time. I almost didn’t care how I heard it in my head. I cared how you heard it in yours. I thought of the audiobook as something we cocreated. I wrote the book, but after that, it became yours.
AL: I think it’s really brave as a writer to be confident enough in your work to hand it over for interpretation and release the expectations of how the story is supposed to sound. So thank you for trusting me with it.
NICOLE HAROUTUNIAN is the author of the novel-in-stories Choose This Now (Noemi Press, 2024) and the story collection Speed Dreaming. Her work has appeared in Story, The Georgia Review, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She works in museum education, holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and lives with her family in Woodside, Queens, in New York City. Find Nicole on Instagram @nicoleharoutunianwriter.
APRYL LEE is a writer and trained voice actor. Her short stories and essays have been published in New Orleans Review, Joyland Magazine, and Necessary Fiction, among others. In 2021, she was awarded a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference to further her work on her novel in progress. In addition, she is the cofounder of Halfway There, a reading series in Montclair, New Jersey, and works as a scriptwriter for Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls for which she was awarded a Webby Award in 2023. When she is not writing characters, she gets to bring to life the characters of others on projects like the Kroger food podcast Noshstalgia and as the audiobook narrator for Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian. Apryl holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New Jersey with her husband and son. Find Apryl on Instagram @aaaprylleee.
