The Season's Best Memoirs Are the Ones You Hear in the Author's Own Voice

A memoir read aloud by the person who lived it has become a serious business, and the credit belongs to the people on the other side of the studio glass. Vanity Fair has profiled the producers and directors who guided Lena Dunham, Al Pacino, Laura Dern and others as they recorded their own books. The work is quieter than it sounds. It takes a director's ear, a producer's patience, and an author willing to turn sentences they wrote into something spoken. On the page, the reader supplies the voice. In a recording, the voice goes back to the person who wrote the book. For anyone who keeps a stack of new memoirs on the side table through the season, that is the case for the audio edition: every pause before a line and every stressed word comes from the author. The people in the booth make the listening as good as the reading.

With reporting from Vanity Fair.