S11 E24: Elizabeth Preston, Simon Rogers, and Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve

[Music] If I had to record again, I would get a time machine and go back in time and every time I interviewed someone for the book, I would ask them to say their name into my audio recorder. We tend to think we're isolated beings but really we're doing things that lots of other people are having to do at the same time. In the days prior to recording, I actually watch when I eat. You can't eat, you know, a burrito with hot sauce, you have to protect your vocal cords. Welcome to This Is The Author. Where authors talk about narrating their audio books. In this episode, Meet Science Journalist Elizabeth Preston, data journalist Simon Rogers, an associate professor of sociology at Brown University, Nicole Gonzalez-Vancleve. Soon in to hear Elizabeth Preston, on looking at parenthood through a scientific lens, Simon Rogers, on the things that our Google searches reveal about us, and Nicole Gonzalez-Vancleve on finding moments of hope within a heavy topic. Enjoy! Hi, this is Elizabeth Preston, author of The Creatures Guide to Caring. I wrote my book because there are about a million parenting books out there, but they seem to mostly be focused on how to do parenting better. They're prescriptive. And that seems to me like a very narrow way to view such a profound and expansive part of people's lives. As a journalist who writes a lot about evolutionary biology and animal behavior, I was interested in exploring the subject of parenthood through those lenses. If I had to describe what it was like to record my audiobook in one word, that word would be focused. Because I'm a freelance journalist, and so most of my days I'm just at my house. I'm working on a dozen different things. I'm answering emails. I'm doing household tours and tasks and calling to set up doctor's appointments for my kids. And it was really a gift to be able to just stay in one place for three or four days, totally focused on one project, mentally and physically, and also a gift to have two other people with me, also putting that focus and attention on my book. I realized I had trouble pronouncing "vomero nasal organ." It's a scent organ and the nose of mice and some other animals. And it's very hard to say for me, but luckily it was only in the book one time. I'm excited that listeners will hear about the "garial." This was my favorite obscure animal discovery of researching this book. It's a weird crocodilian that lives in India, and it has some really interesting behaviors that I'm glad people will get to hear about. I prepared for the audiobook recording by bringing two little wallet-sized school photos of my kids into the studio and putting them on the table in front of me. I was hoping that seeing their faces out of the corner of my eye would help me to maintain a warm, engaged tone and not just sound like it was a slog. If I had to record again, I would get a time machine and go back in time, and every time I interviewed someone for the book, I would ask them to say their name into my audio recorder, because it turns out trying to confirm the pronunciation of 80 people's names after the fact is much harder. To be honest, it's hard to imagine somebody else reading this book besides me, because it's very much in my own voice, even though it's not a memoir. I'm just very much present as myself, as the narrator and the guide. The last audiobook that I listened to that I loved was Life Form by Jenny Slate. She's a really interesting and inventive writer, as well as a great actor, and she wrote these essays about motherhood, and it was really cool to see how the whole project came together in her voice. My favorite place to listen to audiobooks is On a Walk, and I usually get them through Libby, and so I don't have that much time before the library sucks back the book to itself, so it's a good excuse to go for extra walks so I can finish my book before it disappears. And now here's a clip from my audiobook. A group of humans is sharing a meal at the end of the day. They look like us, but not quite. They're wearing less clothing, if any. No one has shaved. Their feet are dusty. It's 100,000 BC on the East African savannah. And with the day's work coming to an end, the band of homo sapiens is sitting around a fire. Some of them are preparing food, roasting tubers, cracking open the fruits of Bayo Bab trees, using a stone knife to cut hunks of impolimit from a fortuitous hunt today. [Music] Hi, this is Simon Rogers, author of What We Ask Google. So it's really inspired by the fact that we search for help more than at any time in Google Trends history. And it may be think that perhaps there's something about the way we search for the everyday things that will really tell us a lot about who we are as humans. And that's what the book is about, is about our lives, is about parenting and pets and food and health and grief and dealing with the most difficult and the happiest moments in our lives. If I had to describe what it was like to record this book in one word, I would say slow. I am quite a fast speaker and I had to be considered and slow down and it was a good exercise for me to do that to make myself sound clearer. The one word or phrase that I had trouble with pronouncing repeatedly was necessarily. I feel like necessarily comes up many times in this book and every single time I had to retake it. I'm really excited for listeners to hear about how much we all have in common. We tend to think we're like isolated beings bouncing around the universe but really we're doing things that lots of other people are having to do at the same time. So I'm excited for readers to understand what we are having common and what we do at different times of the day and different times of year and to be surprised by how our online searching really tracks our daily lives. I prepared to record my audiobook by not preparing enough. I should have done vocal exercises, I should have taken a breath. It took me a little while to get into the cadence of recording a book and it's a whole new skill for me so it's exciting that I've learned something new today. My dream narrator, living or dead, wow, I think it would probably be a British actor from the 1940s called John Mills. I just love all those kinds of films. I used to watch them with my mum when I was a kid and there's something about his voice which makes me feel like happy and he was a very human actor so there was a kind of humanity to the way that he would pronounce and talk about things. The last audiobook I listened to was a recent book about a distant event which was James Hollen's book about the Battle of Britain which just came out I think last year, excellent book and I loved how he wove stories of real people into the big geopolitical moments. I listened to recordings when I'm walking the dock, I live in San Francisco so it means I can go to the beach and take a decent walk and I'll have an audiobook on there. And now listen to a clip from my audiobook. Imagine you are about to be hit by one of the worst storms in history. What runs through your head? Well, I can actually tell you it's August 2017 and Hurricane Harvey is barreling towards Texas and Louisiana. It will cause devastation to everything in its path leading to the loss of over a hundred lives. While preparing for the storm, battling down hatches and stockpiling emergency supplies, some Texans paused to search Google for something, something personal and understandable and very, very human. How to calm a dog in a storm. Hi, this is Nicole Gonzalez-Fant Cleve and I'm the author of Crime Fictions, How Racist Lies Built a System of Mass-Rongful Conviction. This book emerged from being embedded in the criminal justice system as a law clerk in Chicago in the prosecutor's office and I was kind of in the belly of the beast. In some ways, you know, I was one of them and yet I was doing a sociological work that turned out to be a book. In working alongside of prosecutors, police officers and judges, I could see that so many cases were just sloppily handled. They didn't care about opening the files. There were so many cases where people were pleading guilty to things they just didn't do. And I knew it was violations of due process, but I didn't really say that this was wrongful conviction. And then I got a call from an exoneration attorney named Stephen Drizzin and Steve had a hunch after reading my first book and working on cases of wrongful conviction and exoneration that police were rigging cases and that there were racist intent in how they were doing it. It was one of those calls that was truly a calling. I felt that I had to go deep and investigate wrongful conviction not as an accident or a misfire, but as a patterned way police create cases in the criminal justice system and can weaponize cases against black children, teens and young people. I had never heard that said before out loud in developing a sample of cases of wrongful conviction from Chicago. I would say the wrongful conviction capital of the nation. We could see the patterns emerging. And that's really the inspiration of this book really exposing that shadow system of justice. I think we all have this false sense like I could read a book. You know, I'm really good at reading books for my kids, but reading a book a long form nonfiction book with lots of complicated words, they have to pronounce just perfectly. It really is an endurance test. You have to protect your voice, drink your tea, do your vocal rest. You know, in a book like crime fictions is an emotional read. You're in it and you are there with those boys in the prison, in the jail at the court. It felt like a roller coaster. You feel emotionally exhausted by the end. It's fun, but it is an endurance test. I admit that I am from a family of people that have dyslexia. For me, it's very subtle. So once in a while I feel very self conscious when I see just a cluster of words, it just, I can't sound out very well. It's a book about wrongful conviction and police brutality. And yes, I had trouble saying coercion or he was cohearsed. And I kept saying it in my head and trying to make it rhyme so I didn't mess up. But that really gave me some trouble. I don't know. In crime fictions, there's so many kind of dramatic moments where these boys are being framed for crimes they didn't commit and they describe it as like being buried alive. Because the book has those intense scenes, my favorite parts are when there are helpers entering into the scene. And one character who is my favorite, one person, God rest his soul is R.U. Jean Pincham. Listeners should imagine him as kind of having that Johnny Cochran swagger. He was known for being a masterful litigator. People would flood to the courts to like hear him talk, hear him perform for the jury, hear him sit on the bench when he became a judge. I don't know, reading those scenes where he is really acting and protecting children, children who are being ambushed and attacked by the Chicago police who are actually innocent, who have done nothing wrong. Oh, God, it's such a relief to have a character like that, a real live hero, right? He was a real life hero in his own right. Oh, man, those are my favorites. It gives me some hope. I used to be a singer in a past life. And so I know that to get through this endurance test that's called reading an audiobook, you have to actually take care of your voice. In the days prior to recording, I do a lot of vocal rest. I do a lot of tea and honey, a lot of cough drops. I actually watch when I eat, like you can't eat, you know, a burrito with hot sauce. You have to protect your vocal cords. And I think a couple times, you know, our engineer heard me doing like little vocal exercises. I had a vocal coach when I was a little girl. And he had us do all these funny tongue twisters. That was kind of one of the other things that I did for my process, saying things like, you know you love unique New York. I love audiobooks and I love the idea that I could be reading and listening to an immersive experience. And I love immersive books, but I also listen to ones that are immersive light. I write nonfiction serious books. So I need an audiobook that's going to make me laugh, that's going to make me feel lighter. And so Amy Poler, I loved her audiobook. It was so lovely and silly and lots of guest appearances, Rachel Dratch, Leslie Jones. I listened to them back to back. And man, I felt so good about my life. They were so fun to listen to and it's wonderful to have some comedy and, you know, just take a break. For a child, it was a fantastic spectacle. Like watching construction workers or dump trucks or garbage trucks. Not the toys that ignited their backyard world, but real ones with real men doing big things. For little guys like Roma in Elijah, a train overhead was one of the perks of living so close to normal avenue and market road. There was safety, happiness, and joy in Anglewood. When Roma grew up, he could tell you the exact moment when all of this, the Anglewood they knew, their childhoods, and their dear friend was lost. It was July 27, 1998. This is the author is a production of Penguin Random House Audio. Thank you for listening.