Audiobooks 11/5/20

I love me some David Sedaris, and goodness knows I could use a laugh. This is a collection of the best stories and essays from his remarkable 25-year career, all selected by Sedaris himself. While I’m a little bummed that “Santaland Diaries” didn’t make the cut, I am overjoyed to see that ‘You Can’t Kill the Rooster” did along with several other favorites.

Read by the author, because who else could do David Sedaris better than David Sedaris??

Lucy and Jake are happily married, and Lucy has set her career aside to devote her life to their kids and a finely tuned domestic routine. Then one afternoon, she gets a call that will forever alter the course of their lives: the caller claims his wife has been having an affair with Lucy’s husband. Lucy and Jake decide to stay together, but on one condition – Lucy gets to hurt Jake three times. I’m scared. Are you scared? I feel like we should be scared.

Read by Clare Corbett (The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley)

Raised outside of Boston, Ivy was taught by her grandmother to use her mild appearance for cover in her thievery of yard sales and secondhand shops. But the jig is up when Ivy’s mother finds out about these schemes and Ivy is swiftly sent packing to China.

Years later, now back in Boston, Ivy runs into the sister of Gideon Speyer, the golden boy from a wealthy political family that was once the object of Ivy’s obsession. It feels like fate, and before she knows it, she’s reeling Gideon in at lavish parties and island getaways. “But just as Ivy is about to have everything she’s ever wanted, a ghost from her past resurfaces, threatening the nearly perfect life she’s worked so hard to build.”

Read by the prolific Emily Woo Zeller (The Bride Test by Helen Hoang, The Poppy War series by R. F. Kuang)

For our most recent episode of the Read Harder podcast, Tirzah and I talked about plays written by an author of color and/or a queer author. I found one of my picks on audio, so I’m sharing that with you today.

In 1846, Dr. George Barry has recently come to Alabama. Philomena is his wife’s 19-year-old servant and also an assistant to Dr. Barry in his quest to cure vaginal fistulas. As such, she tends to his patients, other enslaved Black pregnant women. Philomena is herself is pregnant with Dr. Barry’s child; when she becomes the patient, her disastrous childbirth changes her life and the doctor’s life forever.

Now for some background: this is a historical drama inspired by the life and experiments of Dr. J Marion Sims and the lives of three of the many enslaved black women he worked on (Lucy, Anarcha, and Betsey are the only names we know of today). Who is Dr. J Marion Sims, you ask? He’s the dude credited as the “father of modern gynecology,” a 19th-century physician and plantation owner who invented the vaginal speculum (“yay”). He pioneered the surgical technique to repair vaginal fistula, a very common 19th-century childbirth complication. Sounds great, right? Well, to quote the folks who host the Queens Podcast (unrelated, but interesting, funny, and super sweary): “history is a bag of d*cks.”

The research behind Dr. Sims’ pioneering technique was done on enslaved women, both ones that he personally owned and others he “ordered” from other plantations. If you aren’t already throwing up in your mouth, brace yourself: he conducted all of his experiments on these women—some of whom had up to 30 procedures performed on them—WITHOUT ANESTHESIA. While contemporary physicians, historians, ethicists, etc condemn Sims’ methods, there are those who continue to defend him; he was “simply a man of his time,” don’tcha know! Those enslaved women with fistulas probably wanted the treatment rull bad and would have consented to the treatment! The problem is that back then, their consent wouldn’t have been any kind of a factor; all that was needed was consent from their owners, who were of course invested in these women’s recovery for purely selfish when-can-she-get-back-to-work reasons.

Behind the Sheet is a fictional exploration of the untold stories of these women, a slim but impactful play that reminded me so much of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. Like Henrietta Lacks, the women “treated” by Dr. Sims were violated and robbed of their agency in the name of science. As with Colson Whitehead, Charly Evon Simpson manages to write with impossible restraint about a sequence of horrifying events, conveying their brutality with sparse language that still manages to bowl you over.

While this isn’t exactly the kind of audiobook I’d pick up this week when I’m all in my feels, it is worth spending time with whenever you have the brain space to do so. It was my first time listening to a play on audio, and I’ll admit it took some getting used to: with no narrator to guide you along the way, you really have to concentrate on each character. Don’t let that dissuade you though, it’s not a bad thing! It’s ultimately so immersive, a different way to take in the format of a play.

Read by an ensemble cast: Monica McSwain, Matthew Floyd Miller, Dominique Morisseau, Larry Powell, Devon Sorvari, Josh Stamberg, Jasmine St. Clair, Danielle Truitt, Inger Tudor, Karen Malina White.