The Coachella Valley-based novelist, who is also an-demand narrator of other people’s books, says she’s writing what she knows.
Like the protagonist in her new novel “Thank You for Listening,” author Julia Whelan is a star narrator of audiobooks. She’s read hundreds of titles and has won multiple awards for her work. But the confusion between the fictional world she creates as a writer and her real-life work as a narrator is understandable; the same kind of confusion also came up with Whelan’s first novel, “My Oxford Year.
As a child, Whelan was an on-screen actor; she had a starring role on the TV series “Once and Again,” the 1999-2002 series that also featured Evan Rachel Wood, Shane West and Sela Ward among the cast. Then, at her college graduation, the mother of one of her friends suggested Whelan give audiobook narration a try. “I knew nothing about audiobooks and I had never listened to one,” Whelan says. “Eventually, after moving back to L.A.
As Whelan dove deeper into the audiobook world, the story that was unfolding in her head took shape. She says that she was surprised to learn that narrators had their own fans. “Especially in romance, how much people care about narrators was surprising for me and so completely obvious at a certain point,” she says.
For Whelan, one element in “Thank You For Listening” that does draw from her own life is the relationship between Sewanee and her grandmother as the latter’s memory is fading. Similarly, Whelan had cared for her grandfather who had dementia. “That’s an experience that I definitely wanted to have the space to write about at some point. I thought it would be its own book entirely,” says Whelan. Ultimately, though, she thought this experience tied in well with the themes of this story.
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