Three memoirs you should read with your ears

For those of you who just sniffed and thought: “Real reading isn’t listening,” I urge you to get over it! You are missing out.

There is nothing better than being so absorbed in a great novel that you drove 20 miles out of your way on your cross-country road trip. I am speaking from experience.

Or walking the dog as your ears fill with a terrific biography you’ve been meaning to get to.

But I’ve found a particular delight in choosing audio memoirs narrated by the authors themselves.

Nothing against some of the expert readers out there, but hearing the writers read the words they crafted with all of the nuance and inflection they intended is sublime.

So here are three excellent memoirs read by the people who put the words to the page.

“Crying in H Mart” is musician Michelle Zauner’s wrenching account of grieving her mother’s diagnosis of cancer and moving home to care and cook for her.

The prose is plainspoken and unflinching as Zauner explores the potential loss of her Korean identity with her mother’s passing.

And there’s a wonderful intimacy in having her voice describe the Korean dishes they loved, the traditions they observed and the bond that these complicated women shared.

“Sobbing near the dry goods,” Zauner writes, “asking myself, am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?”

I’ve recommended Ann Patchett’s “Truth & Beauty: A Friendship” before but if you’ve never had a chance to read it on the page, you could not do better than listening to Ann Patchett’s voice – a tone I think of as a sprightly alto – unspool the story of this exceptional friendship.

Patchett and author Lucy Grealy met in college and a relationship was launched that would shape both their lives as people and as writers.

“We were younger than any 22-year-old girls in the world,” Patchett narrates, “still believing absolutely that there was nothing more important, more romantic, than Yeats.”

The friendship burns brightly, wobbles, deepens and endures even as Patchett mourns Lucy’s accidental overdose death at age 39.

Finally, before Wes Moore was elected governor of Maryland, he was a Johns Hopkins graduate, Rhodes scholar, former military officer and high flying financier who’d written a terrific, best-selling memoir.

“The Other Wes Moore” – narrated by Wes Moore – tells the story of a man who was also named Wes Moore – who’d also been raised in Baltimore, whose family history was strikingly similar but whose path led him into prison, not politics.

You’ll lean in as Wes Moore opens the memoir with: “One of us is free and has experienced things that he never even knew to dream about as a kid. The other will spend every day of his life until his death behind bars for a robbery that left a police officer and father of five dead. The chilling truth is that his life could have been mine.”

— Kerri Miller | MPR News