The New Yorker Radio Hour - An Audiobook Master on the Secrets of Her Craft

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

You’ve probably never heard of Robin Miles, but you may well have heard her—possibly at some length. Miles is an actor who’s cultivated a particular specialty in recording audiobooks, a booming segment of the publishing industry. She has lent her voice to more than 400 titles in all sorts of genres—from the classic “Charlotte’s Web” to Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste,” a deep analysis of race in America. “Telling a story, fully, all of it—from all the aspects of it—and creating the kind of intimacy between you and your listener is so satisfying,” she tells the New Yorker editor Daniel Gross. “Being in a great play means you have to have the money and the other actors and a script and a director. This is just me and my book, and I love that.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. You've probably never heard the name Robin Miles. But there's a good chance you've heard her. And maybe at some length. Stop your nonsense, Wilbur, said the oldest sheep. If you have a new friend here, you are probably disturbing his rest. And the quickest way to spoil a friendship is to wake somebody. up in the morning before he's ready. How can you be sure your friend is an early riser?

Robin Miles is an actor who's appeared in over 400 audiobooks, 400 in all sorts of genres, from E.B. White's classic, Charlotte's Web, to Isabel Wilkerson's cast, which is a deep analysis of race in America. Audio books are a booming segment of the publishing industry, and Miles has cultivated that as a specialty. She describes herself as a vocal chameleon, skilled at imitating and playing with accents for different characters, even inventing new accents. Daniel Gross, who's an editor at The New Yorker, has been writing about Robin Miles, and they've gotten pretty deep into the craft of reading a book out loud. Robin records a lot of her books in her closet,

and it's a little trapezoidal closet, which is smaller than like a shower stall. Robin has impeccable posture. She has a ballet instructor's posture. And she has these sharp cheekbones. And I remember that she took her shoes off before she walked into the studio. And even when I went to a professional recording studio with her, she took off her rain boots and then she walked into the studio. She always records barefoot. Teach me one of your warmups. I want to try it out. We're in front of a microphone now. So, okay. Basically, starting with your middle range and then going down with a kind of a nasally Y sound. So, yin, yin, and then coming forward, and I do an in-breath. Until I get to that buzzy spot where you hear it going in and out. It means the sound is popping in and out of different sinus chambers. loosening everything up in there. I feel like I'm at the beginning of a classical concert

and everybody's tuning their instruments. Yes, that's sometimes how I feel too. Definitely. You trained as an actor. You could have worked in TV, film, Broadway. You did work in some of these areas. I have. Why narration?

Oh, wow. Well, all right, I'm going to tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good is telling a story fully all of it from all the aspects of it and creating the kind of intimacy between you and your listener is so satisfying being in a great play

means you have to have the money and the other actors and a script and a director this is just me in my book and I love that secondly it's bottom's dream from a midsummer night's dream let me play the Lions part too. And, you know, I should play Fisbee in a monstrous small voice.

I love to play all those different characters. I'm a vocal chameleon. At least that's what I've been called. And I loved it. I was like, okay, I'll take that. I feel like a vocal chameleon sometimes. And transforming myself into those things and trying to find a truthful way to do that. There's nothing else like it, really.

I get to exercise every muscle in my body and my mind, too. So why? This. Now, the practical, the ugly, is when I got out of drama school. Man, I think I got out in 94. I don't remember exactly when this began, but there was a stretch. where Hollywood or television did not create one black or minority character in the television lineup for the new season. And I had a powerful agent at the time.

There was almost nothing for me to go out for. That was the world you graduated into. Into. And it's timing. You know, sometimes somebody else comes out and it's like, wow, they're in the Shonda Rhymes period. that's fabulous. I've been waiting for the Shonda Rhymes period, you know, to come, where we have these writers creating opportunities,

and we have a population of people in the United States who are beginning to see, they're beginning to expand their notion of who can be American. Because I do think that's really what's at the base of it. You know, you have an Asian actor, you have a black actor, you've got Middle Eastern actor, why can't they just play an American? But we don't have, I mean, during that period especially,

we didn't have access to those roles. So you had to wait for something to match your ethnicity. And not just your ethnicity, but the ethnicity that was perceived when a person saw you. Right. So graduating into that world. And I thought, well, let me park myself here. Let me hang out over here.

But I got so much. much from doing the books. And, you know, then I realized, of course, you know, this is an after job now, Sag Aftera, but I had health insurance. I had health insurance. That's always what does it, right? And it was my second book, Kane River by Lolita Tatami. Seven generations, I believe, might be six, of family members in slavery in Louisiana. And the, you creating of that family line, mostly through rape. I mean, that's what it, you know, that is what it is in this book. But the slave owners were French. And so a lot of the men are coming literally from France. So that first generation, all those men now cease. They all have a very crisp French accent. And then they have their children. And what I did was I started to create what would be, a Creole dialect because it doesn't

start out that way and then each generation start to have a little modette going on like the rhythm and the vowel sounds and I thought nobody's ever going to notice and then the review came out and I thought wow people are

people really listen the reviewer was really listening so you were basically inventing a language or a dialect because it was in that middle space between a French accent. Yeah, it's kind of liminal. Yeah. And I do that now a lot in fantasy and in sci-fi.

I'll take, I call them mashops. It's the Jamaican term, so mashitop. I'll take, I'll have a character, let's say, that's from a dominant race in the universe, or that has some sort of power. And I'll say, well, all right, you know, German. and Nigerian, Nigeria is a power on that continent and Germany is a power on that continent. And I'll take the German consonant sounds or vowel sounds

and I'll mash it up with the rhythm pattern of somebody who might come from Nigeria. Wow. So that it doesn't sound exactly like one of those things and it's so you can't just say, well, it's German, but it's not. There's something else in there. How do you keep it straight so that when you return to that character,

10 pages later, you're in the same voice and not in some other voice. Oh, that's a... That took me a while to really, I think, nail. What I do is I start reading the book, and I'll get about 80 pages in and stop. And I'm underlining and highlighting any characteristics about a character. This is when you're reading... And I'm doing the pre-read. I'm just pre-read now. I'm reading the way anybody would read a book, maybe a little bit more slowly.

I highlight, underline, and then I stop at about page 80. I take everything and put it into my tracking dock. I want to know how old they are. I want to know if they're tall or short. Do they have a barreled chest? I want to know what they look like. I'm going to put the length of their hair, the color of their hair, that they speak out of the sides of their mouth.

Anything big like a lisp or an accent, of course I'm going to notice and notate. And then I'm looking at what are their reactions? When they're in scenes with other people, are they quick to anger? Are they snarky? Are they? What, who is this person? And then I have all that written down. Why is it important to know if they're tall or if they're barrel-chested?

How does that figure into your performance of it? Oh, oh. Imagine. Okay, I have a character named Fran, and she was in 12 times blessed. Wow, I remember that. Fran is described as being, she's like 6-6-1, she's described as being able to drink a guy under the table. She's the best friend of the protagonist.

And I thought, if I were 6-1 in a woman, almost every single person that I have conversations with is going to be looking physically down several inches at them. And if my friend is 5'6, I'm literally going to be looking down. So one day I was sort of just reading, And I thought, I put my finger on my chin. And I went, so my face, the plane of my face, would always be tilted down.

And as soon as I did that, it kind of compressed. Right there, there's Fran. It kind of compressed my vocal cords. And there's Fran. And she's just like, you're great kind of like everyday gal. She's got her feet on the ground. No nonsense. I got a hall on a mattress up the stairs.

I can do that. That's no problem. But it came from the plane of her face, would be tilted toward this floor all the time. It's physical. It's not just auditory. It's actually in the body. It was in my body.

I have used other ways in, like in the book, Windy City Blues. It's the story of chess records. The two brothers who ran chess records are prominent characters. And so in that book, she describes what they sound like. He gets on the phone, and he's trying to sell his black artists, right? because it's a black blues label. And he gets in the phone, and then when he shows up, they're shocked that he's white. So there was something about how he was talking that needed to have a little molasses in it.

That's what I call it. And then that came from that nugget. Wow. Right? You don't have to know what it is that makes him sound black. But they're shocked when he shows up, and he's not. black. I know how that feels. People are shocked when I show up and I'm not white. So, yeah, I get that. I just did a historic piece, Shana, which is by a writer who wrote all romances, but it takes

place in the 1700s. And so I had to have characters that sounded like that. And the jailers, They were all like cockney characters, right? You know, in the jail and, you know, they're brutalizing other people. And so I had to be able to do that, which means way open throat, galatolizing, glottalizing, glottal shocking a lot. I love playing pirates, you know, you know, a bottle of rum. But, I mean, how much more fun could an actor ever have playing a pirate? This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come.

There's this push in Hollywood and in stage acting to be a lot more thoughtful about casting. And, you know, you're less likely now to see a Korean actor playing a Chinese character, you know, a South Asian actor playing a Latina character. The rules seem slightly different in audio. And I wonder what they are from your perspective. How do you think about, do you think of audiobook narration in that same way? I think about it similarly in that if there's a book with a main character who is from a place and a lot of the other people in the book are from that same place, it makes sense. It just does to try and find someone from that culture who narrates. The second part of that, someone who narrates, not just an actor because it is a different medium.

learning how to approach this material in story form like this is different. And I know as an audiobook director when I've had celebrities, sometimes you really got to give them more time to make that transition from what they know to this new thing. But you also get books where you have an international cast. And at that point, you need somebody who has a background like I do, who feels comfortable doing, okay, there's a Swedish character. There's an Irish character. There's a Jamaican. There's a this. You're going to need to have somebody who can pull that off. A vocal chameleon, you said. Yes, a vocameleon? I don't know. I will say, though, I think this idea of authenticity in entertainment, because it's really the broader stroke is film, TV, stage, etc. Authenticity is not just...

I don't know how to be clear about this, but we have a population of people here that are from all over the place. And a lot of the marginalized people who have not been allowed to be an American since forever have also been, oftentimes barred from even playing themselves. Like they were casting white actors as Latinos since the beginning of time. And white actors in blackface, white actors in yellow face with their eyes taped. I mean, there's that horrible Mickey Roe. Rooney cameo. Yep. That's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Right. And the actors were here the whole time. So the way I describe it is this. We have a big bin full of shoes, right? And the shoes are from all these different countries, right? They're culturally specific shoes. And for years and years and years, white actors have been pulling whatever shoe they want out of the bin. And the actors whose shoes they actually belong to haven't even been able to approach the bin. They can't even get their own shoes out. Right now what's happening?

is the entertainment industry is saying, wait, wait, give those shoes back, let the person who's Korean wear the Korean shoes, et cetera, give them their own authentic shoes back. And we're claiming them and saying, oh, my God, I get to be me. But over time, we all want to be able to have a shoe bin that we can draw from. A Korean actor should not be only playing Korean characters and Japanese characters. I mean, they should be playing all Asian characters. I think in the long run, but right now we are in what I consider a healing beat. It's a restoration of people's rights back to them. And when those actors and cultures are ready to put their shoes

back in the bin and when they're allowed to draw from the bin, the American shoes they've been barred from drawing from, then we'll have a world where those things are much more open. Okay, we can go in that direction. But no, no. No marginalized actor, POC actor, LGBTQ actor wants to be only playing inside that box, but they haven't even been able to get inside that box for a while. Well, since forever, really. What kinds of roles would you not take? I think if something especially is first person,

and it's from specifically like an Asian culture or even, a Russian culture. We have actors who can do that. I mean, think about African Americans are 12% of the population. That's it. 12%. So how many white actors have grown up around black families? It's only going to be a handful because we've been living with segregation. We're still living with segregation, but I'm acknowledging when and where would most white actors in our country have extended time with black families and friends. But think about it from the other side? We're only 12% of the population. Every room we go into, everywhere we go, we're surrounded by a culture that's defined by white culture. We either grow up in it and we know it like the back of our hand, or if we don't and we grow up, let's say, more of a

specifically black neighborhood that's separate. As we go along and go into college and go into jobs, we have to know the dominant culture to survive. But that's not true for white actors. And I've met several who, they have grown up around black folks, but it is a thorny kind of a thing right now. And I think we'll get through it because we are beginning to realize that we have to, we have to respect that there are cultural differences. I do not expect to be cast in crazy rich Asians, you know, the audio drama. I don't, there are too many things that I don't know from an insider view. Yeah, yeah.

I was doing ADR, which is additional dialogue recording. I used to do that a lot in New York, and we were dubbing a film, and we were doing a scene where everybody in the room was a black guy, and it was a bachelor party, so I'm the only woman in the room, because I'm voicing the two women. But one of the guys in the loop group was a white guy who's like cooled down, you know, he's got lots of black friends. He's just kind of like got that coolness and that urban coolness. And the guy, two guys get in a fight. And we have to improv on the mic.

And he said, whoa, whoa, somebody called the cops. And every black man in that room stopped their improv and just looked over at him like, no, that's not what would happen. You're instantly out of character. Well, it's because he didn't know that if a group of black men are in a hotel room having a bachelor party and they call the police, chances are

somebody's going to walk out wounded. And that's a best case scenario. But he didn't know that. And so they were all sort of shocked into silence for a second. And the poor guy, he was like, what? What? He had no idea why it wasn't appropriate.

Yeah. And so you need somebody with that kind of, just like insider knowledge when you're doing cultural work. And I will say this, I narrate, or I've been doing this for so long, and I do it so often during the week, that I live in a state of emotional openness that can be a little frightening to exist in that state of no defenses. I have to make sure that the people around me and my friends and thank God for my whole. husband Ty, they understand that I just live in a very vulnerable state day in and day out. You're channeling all of the stories that you tell. I need to be open. Yes, I need to be open enough as a human to let whatever that author put in there register

and then bounce back out. Yeah. Robin Miles, thank you so much. I had a really good time. Thank you for having me. Me too. Me too. Thank you.

Welcome. You can read more from Daniel Gross on Robin Miles and her work at New Yorker.com. She's the narrator of hundreds of audiobooks, and here she is reading from Jacqueline Woodson's Another Brooklyn. For a long time, my mother wasn't dead yet. Mine could have been a more tragic story. My father could have given into the bottle or the needle or a woman and left my brother and me to care for ourselves, or worse, in the care of New York. York City Children's Services, where my father said there was seldom a happy ending. But this didn't happen. I know now that what is tragic isn't the moment. It is the memory. I'm David Remnick. Thanks so much for listening today. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC

studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Breda Green, Calilea, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gophane and Putubuele. Along with Adam Howard, Jeffrey Masters, and Max Bolton. And we had assistance from Mike Cuchman,

Meher Batia, and James Napoli. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.