Let’s keep Freak Week going! Join the Cut for our first-ever theme week pop-up event, a one-night-only book club for smut and romance fans at Brooklyn bookstore the Ripped Bodice on Sunday, June 30. More info and tickets here.
As any Emily Henry fan will tell you, Julia Whelan is really good at narrating romance. The so-called Adele of audiobooks has voiced more than 600 titles, including blockbusters like Gone Girl and The Women, so when I log into Zoom and see Whelan in what she calls her “cave” — a windowless recording booth in her Palm Springs home encased in foam egg crates — I’m eager to luxuriate in the voice I’ve heard piped through my headphones countless times. The one that reminds me of Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding, cooing “I’ve got moves you’ve never seen.” The one that’s low and throaty, that makes male characters growl and female characters grow quiet and breathy, that can give you goosebumps on even the most basic sentence.
So imagine my surprise when Whelan gamely answers my questions about how, exactly, she makes romance novels sound so hot in a completely normal voice. (It’s probably best that she didn’t purr her way through the interview, or I would have been too distracted to focus.) Whelan started out as a child actor, with roles in the TV movie Fifteen and Pregnant alongside Kirsten Dunst and in the ABC drama Once and Again, and later fell into recording audiobooks after getting a creative-writing degree. Voicing novels eventually led her to write her own, including Thank You for Listening, which is about audiobook narrators who fall in love while recording a spicy romance together. Whelan has since recorded Casanova LLC, the novel’s book-within-a-book, and used it to launch an audio-based publishing company, Audiobrary. The platform licenses existing audiobooks as well as ones that haven’t been published yet, creates its own content, and aims to give more profits to narrators, who currently don’t get royalties from traditional publishers.
Below, Whelan talks about how she approaches steamy scenes, using an alias to record spicier fare early in her career, and why romance novels demand vulnerability.
You’re well known for voicing some very famous books like Gone Girl, and Emily Henry romances that have classy, not smutty, sex scenes. Is that a conscious choice?
I think smut is relative. Everyone has their own spice level. I actually fell into recording for Emily because I narrated a couple of her YA novels and I loved her writing. When she was moving into adult, I made it clear that I wanted to do all of her adult audiobooks moving forward. From the narration perspective, I recorded a lot of romance earlier in my career under an alias. The books that I choose to do under my own name are more mainstream, but I have zero problem narrating all levels of spice.
Why did you have an alias?
At the time that I was recording under an alias, I was still doing on-camera work. And I had, as a former child actor, uncomfortable, stalky sort of situations. I didn’t want men to be able to find me and listen to me reading this stuff to them.
I’ll be sure not to out your alias.
I’m actually about to bring my alias out of retirement to do a project for Audiobrary. So it’s kind of the worst-kept secret in audiobooks, and at this point I don’t care, I’m over that. But for other people, there are distinct reasons why they will try to keep that firewall. They have kids in schools, or they have an ex who’s trying to find a reason to take their kids away from them.
Do you remember the first really racy sex scene that you narrated?
I remember it because I actually looked up the pronunciation for clitoris to make sure. I mean, I know how to say this, but I second-guess every pronunciation. I don’t take anything for granted. I remember physically typing clitoris into Merriam-Webster and thinking, This is the weirdest job I’ve ever had in my life. The last thing you want to do in moments like that is take the listener out of it. Everything’s going along smoothly, they’re totally in, and then they’re like, Wait, record scratch, what was that?
How do you physically warm up for a day of reading?
I drink a lot of water in the morning, don’t have any dairy in my coffee or tea, and do some vocal exercises, not dissimilar to the kind singers do. Then I’ll usually read a few pages before I start recording, just to get back into the flow of the book.
What about if you’re going to be narrating a sex scene that day?
It’s not different from doing any other scene. The only thing to understand about romance is that the scenes of physical intimacy are often the scenes of emotional intimacy, too. Those are the scenes where the story turns or changes, or a character learns something or they’re confronted with something. You could map a thriller on top of that same structure and you would have the same scenes. It’s just that in romance, those character-driven moments are seen through the lens of physical intimacy. These scenes are serving the story, and the story is about the characters and this relationship. It’s no different from recording a battle scene in a fantasy, where you’re rushing towards that final scene where everything changes.
Do you do anything to prepare for something that’s going to be more emotional, or does it just come as you’re reading it?
I think it comes naturally. I do find that if I’ve had a protracted foreplay sequence, you know, reading 50 pages leading up to this moment, I like to be able to follow that arc all the way through as opposed to stopping and saying, “Well, I’ll finish that tomorrow.” I like to keep going because there is something very challenging about coming into the booth totally cold in the morning, looking at my iPad and saying, “Oh God, that’s right, I left off at the sex scene.”
How do you sound convincing when you’re recording a steamy scene?
It’s acting. If the emotion of the character warrants a shallow breath, I do it. I don’t add extra breaths or gasping or anything that might sound like actual love-making because I’m not doing audio porn. I’m reading a book. If it’s not on the page, I don’t do it.
How do you approach doing different voices for male and female characters?
When I was first starting out, I would try to make the male voices low and bassy and sexy. Frankly, I didn’t have the vocal range at that point, because my own speaking voice was a lot higher than it is now. Six hundred books have dropped my range down and it’s allowed me access to deeper tones for men. But I realized at a certain point that none of that means anything unless you understand who the character is. So I stopped just trying to be low, and I was going toward giving them the same character work that I would give to my heroines — saying, what makes this guy tick? What does he want? What makes somebody sexy?
How do you do that?
Emily Henry is a really good example, where all of her heroes are charming and sexy for very different reasons. I think you find something in each of those characters to latch on to that makes them leading men. Not everybody needs to sound like the alpha bro, you know, typical stock character-hot guy. You’re really going after, if this were a guy you meet in a bar, what makes you say, “Sure, you can buy me a drink?”
And what do you think it is about your voice in particular that people enjoy so much?
I have heard from people that it just sounds trustworthy. I think it’s that I approach a text with the confidence of a writer understanding a book and saying, just sit back and relax, and I will tell you this story. It could also be the fact that I sound okay when I’m sped up to 1.5. I don’t sound like Minnie Mouse, and that’s a big part of it.
You’re voicing these scenes that can be arousing for people — though probably way more women than men listen. Do people come up to you and act strangely toward you?
The secret is that men have not caught on yet, but they should be listening to romance. For the most part, the audience for these books are women. While it is a deeply intimate experience to have someone’s voice in your ear, and I definitely have fans who feel that they know me, who feel that they have a relationship to me, I don’t think it’s hypersexualized in the way it can be with some of the male narrators for the straight women that listen to them.
Are there things that make a particularly good sex scene to you, from the author perspective and from the narration perspective?
I had specific reasons for going light on the love scenes with my first book. In Thank You for Listening, I think my reticence to put sex on the page was because those characters felt very close to me. I was just like, They need some privacy. But with Casanova, I knew I couldn’t pull my punches. I set myself the challenge of saying, “I don’t want to write a sex scene that could have happened to any character; I only want to write sex scenes that could happen between these two specific characters.” So going back to the emotional needs of your characters and your story — what does the character need to learn at this point? What do they need to be challenged on? — and tailoring those scenes to be that for those characters. I wrote a terrible first draft that was like every plug-and-play sex scene you could find, and I was just bored. I was like, If it doesn’t have anything to do with these two specific characters, then it’s taking up space.
How did you then change it to make it so that you felt like it did move the story forward?
I thought about what type of situation would make each character feel the most vulnerable because that’s where the most exciting stuff happens, right? That’s where conflict happens. That’s where self doubt happens. That’s where overcoming yourself happens. So I tried to choose situations that would be difficult for each character. And then the surprise becomes what they find in those situations.
What was the experience of narrating Casanova LLC like? Was it different from other books you’ve done?
This was different mainly because I was doing it duet-style with another narrator playing the opposite role. So we were doing it live in conversation with each other, where usually I’m playing all the characters. That was me doing it the way I thought was best for that particular story, and really enjoying the feeling of acting again with another person.
What do you think is the future of romance fiction?
For 40 years, this category has not gotten the respect that it deserves. It keeps the lights on in publishing. Romance has always been at the vanguard of social change of advocating for relationships, all kinds of relationships, and just because it’s mostly by women, for women, it’s been denigrated. I really feel that the work that it has done in aiding acceptance of queer relationships, of talking about things like domestic violence, disability, motherhood, and what that means to people — there is so much salient human stuff embedded in these books. I’m kind of glad that people shit on them, because if they knew what was going on, they would look at it more closely and probably ruin it.
Why would they ruin it?
I think because you get another element coming in saying, “Well, let me see what you guys are saying to each other.” That level of scrutiny can make things more difficult. There’s just a lot of really positive things that come out of this category and if people don’t want to read it because, “I don’t like smut,” or, “that just makes me uncomfortable,” that’s fine.
Maybe you have an answer for this, but it does seem like there’s this desire to understand romance. But people don’t want the actual answer, which is that romance requires vulnerability. It requires a buy-in to feeling hope when you read, and that is not something our society likes. We don’t take joy seriously.
I don’t know the answer, other than just that it’s something women enjoy, and it involves sexuality, so people want to judge it without knowing what it is.
That’s been the case with this category for decades, right? The denigration of female sexuality. People see the old covers with Fabio and they were like, “You find that sexy?” There’s so much more going on here. You know what I find sexy? I find communication sexy. I find actually wanting to please your partner sexy. I find taking responsibility for your actions and owning when you mess up sexy. All of that is embedded in romance. There’s a part of me, the conspiracy part of me, that feels that that’s why we keep trying to denigrate it.
