My Life in the Closet…With My Imaginary Friends
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
By George Guidall / White Plains, N.Y.
I sit in the closet —- door closed. Acoustic panels on the walls surround me, the microphone close to my face—and I enter worlds that require demonstrating what it means to be human. Or what it once meant.
This is the strange, private work of narrating (performing) audiobooks.
It’s what I do most and love best.
Have you ever grown so close to people that it felt as if you were an extension of them? Or that they were an extension of you? I can feel the pain of Jean Val Jean in Les Misérables. I still can’t bring myself to say “I’ll call you sometime” to Raskolnikov—-they sent him to jail! And I’ve never stopped regretting that I wasn’t there when my sweet Don Quixote passed away.
These are just a few of my friends. The rest float in my memory of past literary encounters.
It may sound strange, but after the years I’ve spent as an actor — an Obie somewhere on a shelf, and recently a Hall of Fame induction by the Audio Publishers Association, I’ve come to realize that the work I’ve done in a closet, alone, with a microphone, is the work that I have meshed with most deeply.
Meshed isn’t even the right word. Melded. Merged with those people, the characters I’ve met and tried to be and grown close to while performing well over 2,000 audiobooks.
People ask what the process feels like, and my honest answer is that it is not reading out loud. From the first word on page one, I’m pulled in—-like Odysseus, but without the good sense to lash myself to the mast. I surrender. My self becomes a function of some immediate need to expose a human being’s life in a way that listeners can share and feel they are there beside me.
I prefer to describe myself as a literary hermit crab, finding shelter and a place to grow inside someone else’s imagined truth.
I look back and remember those people, the characters with whom I’ve merged. They’ve stayed with me — fighting in so many wars, wounded in one of them, died in another. As a general, I spoke at a memorial of my heroic death. I killed the bad guys and made our country safer. Solved those murders nobody could solve— loved with the lovers, lost with the losers. I still visit my friends in Absaroka County, Wyoming, every time Craig Johnson writes a new Walt Longmire adventure.
That’s the blessing of this work. New friends, all the time.
Fans often write to me, wanting to share their experiences after listening. Sometimes they ask for a photograph. I never send one. I can’t. I’m the man behind the curtain, pushing buttons, making the voice bring thunder or spring rain, impending dread or a loving sigh.
Pull the curtain? Reveal the wizard? No! I can already hear them:
That’s Don Quixote?
That’s the sheriff?
Oh, no! LOOK at him!
Better to stay in the closet.
The transformation of the written word into a spoken experience still excites me, often revealing depth of feeling that doesn’t quite surface on the page. There is a music in a character’s voice that gives an immediacy to the event—an immediacy that bypasses the cerebral acknowledgment of written facts and goes straight to the listener’s heart.
Immediacy is the word I keep coming back to. It’s why I can’t quite let these people go when the recording is finished, and why, decades in, I still walk into that closet with a small flutter of anticipation. There are people waiting for me.......to meet.......to play their music.
Years ago, when I was starting out, my 80-year-old father was skeptical.
“You’re sure?” he asked.
“Just try it, Dad. See if you like it.” I handed him a cassette.
He called the next day, his voice full of excitement.
“Georgie! I loved it. I took it to bed with me and in five minutes, I was fast asleep! Fantastic!”
I think of him often, in the closet.
George Guidall is an actor and one of the most prolific audiobook narrators in history, having recorded over 2,000 books. Guidall has built a successful 40-year career in theater, performing on Broadway and winning the coveted Obie Award Off-Broadway. Known for an expressive baritone and exceptional emotional nuance, he has brought life to classic literature from Homer’s Iliad to Cervantes’ Don Quixote to the works of Dostoyevsky, as well as a wide range of bestsellers. He has received multiple Audie Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award, and recently was honored by the Audio Publishers Association with an induction into its Hall of Fame.