On talking into microphones and being perceived
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
This week’s post is 1) the last of the year and 2) free for all subscribers! Gentle apologies to my free subscribers who haven’t gotten any posts since [checks] uh, September. Life comes at you fast, what can I say. Also, some of you were on comped subscriptions that may have lapsed, so if that’s the case and you need your comp re-upped, just respond to this email and I’ll take care of it when I get a chance. Thanks for reading!
This week I thought I had felt all the feelings I could have about being asked to play and speak for This American Life on short notice, and then I accidentally found very distressing information I absolutely wasn’t looking for. (Don’t you hate getting Accidental Information(TM)? It’s like getting jumped by a clown yelling “Did you know that strawberries aren’t berries, they’re aggregate accessories?” Upsetting.)
I have given multiple interviews on local radio stations and niche podcasts, so I consider myself fairly comfortable speaking in that medium, and am getting better at avoiding the pitfalls of having your voice recorded for an audience (running words together, interrupting the interviewer, making jokes that were hilarious when you tweeted them but not remotely funny when you say them out loud).
It’s either a very good or a very bad thing that this confidence is combined with my blissful ignorance about the world of radio and podcasts. I’d heard of This American Life when J first approached me about doing an episode. I knew vaguely it had to do with NPR and in my head went “Wow, this is big! They probably get like, oh I don’t know, 100,000 listeners! That’s a lot for me!”
Then, the night before the taping, I said, “I probably should know something about the show” (when J first called me he said, “Are you familiar with the show?” and after a long silence I went, “Well…I’ve heard of it…”) so I went to their website to see what they’re all about and that’s when I accidentally found a Very Distressing Piece of Information:
Our show reaches more than 4 million listeners each week, with 2.6 million downloading the weekly podcast and 1.6 million listening across 500+ public radio stations.
4 MILLION.
FOUR! MILLION! MILLION WITH AN ‘M’!
I’ve had tweets get millions of impressions, but in my head, social media isn’t real, so that doesn’t count. I’ve been written about in publications that intellectually I know have millions of readers, but you hear about how journalism is dying and people don’t read articles all the way through anymore, so in my head, that doesn’t count either.
Who are all these people listening to This American Life? You’re telling me that 2.6 million people actually listen to podcasts?? And now they’ll be listening to me??
(I texted one friend in distress that I didn’t want to be perceived anymore and she responded, “You chose a career as a performing artist???”)
Because I am what Betty Smith in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn describes as “a reading child,” I process about 95% of what happens to me through the literary exploits I’m familiar with. I relate a lot of my life experiences to…well, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and have also randomly texted friends things like “I was like Sara Crewe with the bun” (Frances Hogsdon Burnett, A Little Princess), or “Just had a real Selin ‘thinking about the prisoners in the gulag’ thought” (Elif Batuman, The Idiot). I am basically a real life Wishbone, only not nearly as cute.
At that moment, there was only one fictional character I identified with, and that was Becky Bloomwood from Sophie Kinsella’s chick-lit masterpiece Confessions of a Shopaholic:
“You'll be fine," he says. "Just don't let the nerves get to you.”
“Nerves?” I say, and give a little laugh. “I’m not nervous! I'm just looking forward to it.”
“Glad to hear it,” says the driver, turning back. “You'll be OK then. Some people, they get onto that sofa, thinking they're fine, relaxed, happy as a clam…then they see that red light, and it hits them that 2.5 million people around the country are all watching them. Makes some people start to panic.”
“Oh,” I say after a slight pause. “Well...I'm nothing like them! I'll be fine!”
“Good,” says the driver.
“Good,” I echo, a little less certainly, and look out of the window. I'll be fine. Of course I will. I've never been nervous in my life before, and I'm certainly not going to start.
Two point five million people.
She gets it.
By the end of the night I had resigned myself. Whatever I ended up doing, saying, or playing on tape the next day, it couldn’t be worse than me landing in a viral LA Times article about an orgasm earlier this year.
Turns out, it’s quite easy to forget that you might be listened to four million people when you’re with a cozy little crew in a studio you know. (Because none of the Los Angeles NPR-affiliate studios near me had pianos, the episode was recorded at the studio I always use, with the same sound engineer I’ve been working with since 2019, so I felt like I was paddling around in familiar waters.)
I have no idea how I did or what all I said or if I was funny enough or if I explained what I was playing well enough or if I used too many metaphors or if I sounded dumb or if I spoke too fast or………all I know is that J asked interesting questions and put me at ease and successfully tricked me into spilling so many thoughts into that annoying little microphone. I talked nonstop for almost three hours, frantically gulping tea every time he asked me a question because talking is murder on the throat.
There are two types of interviews, in my mind; there is the interview where you offer some thoughts up and the interviewer publishes them with no or minimal editing, so the audience gets everything you said in context, with the narrative as you’ve given it.
Then there’s the kind of interview where the interviewer coaxes a great deal of information and feeling out of you, far more than can possibly go into a single article or episode or show. If the interviewer is good—and they have to be, to get that much out of you—it feels like therapy. I’ve been interviewed by journalists who made me, in the moment, feel like they got me, they understood me, they truly wanted to know how I felt about the things I was talking about, they cared about who I was as a person. Sometimes the journalist asks you a really good question and then as you’re answering you realize you’re coming to an epiphany about yourself right on the spot and it’s an absolute revelation.
It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that while this person may genuinely find you interesting and wants to know more, they also have their own narrative in mind, one that isn’t exactly the same as the one you would craft, and one that definitely doesn’t need all your amusing but irrelevant anecdotes.
After interviews like that, there’s a very specific feeling of vulnerability. You’ve just given this person so much of yourself, and now they’re free to chop it up into little pieces and stitch those pieces together in a different order with their own analysis and framing, and they can slap whatever headline or title they want on it and you have no say. (I’m still a little 🙃 about the time a major newspaper took a side comment I barely remember saying and made it into a provocative headline.) They have it all: your off-the-cuff remarks, your “umm”s and “uhh”s, your impassioned monologues, and you just handed that all over and relinquished control of it.
I have no idea what the edited episode is going to be like. (Heck, I don’t even know when it’s coming out, and a producer could always decide that the story isn’t a good one and kill it.) I have no control over how I’m portrayed or how the story is told. I can’t know if anyone will like it (or me).
What I do know is my vocal cords do not have the stamina for me to be a professional talker. It’s been a couple of days since the studio taping, and my throat is still furiously going “What have you done to me??” I have no idea how radio personalities and podcasters do it.
I expressed this sentiment on Instagram, and a radio host at a major station responded, “Well, we don’t know how your 10 fingers on 88 keys do it either.”
Some things, I guess, will always remain mysteries.
Stuff I’ve been listening to
When I heard “Nothing Matters” by The Last Dinner Party for the first time I went on Bluesky and wrote, “This is like if a troupe of goth theater kids became possessed by the spirit of ABBA.” (I know ABBA is still around themselves, but the sentiment still stands. One does not have to be dead to possess someone else. I don’t know if that’s a thing, I just made it up.)
I can’t stop listening to this song?? I keep going “Okay, we’ve listened enough,” and then walk away, and then I have to come back and hit play again.
I also recently learned about the existence of Laufey, which I guess makes me kind of an Old because apparently the kids have known about her for a while, but you know what, I believe that books, music, films, etc. come to you when you’re ready to receive them.
You may have noticed that I definitely like my non-classical music on the intense, hyperfrenetic side, so Laufey’s more mellowed-out jazz-singer-songwriter style is usually not my thing. This week, though, adding pumped-up music to my panic did not seem particularly helpful, and listening to Laufey’s album Bewitched was like gently placing my psyche in a warm bath.
We had the Laufey Essentials playlist going in the car on the way to the studio, and I’m certain it played at least a small role in keeping me calm.
See you in 2024, I guess??
That’s it for this week and, I suppose, this year? I have not had the time, wherewithal, or mental space to do any one of those end of year round-up posts, so this is it. Thanks for reading my assorted thoughts this year, and see you all in 2024! I hope you all have a relaxing, cozy holiday season and a delightful new year! 🎹