Who has narrated Gillian Flynn’s thriller “Gone Girl,” Tara Westover’s “Educated,” and more than four hundred other audiobooks? Meet Julia Whelan, one of the most in-demand audiobook narrators today. She has also narrated the digital versions of many news articles, mostly from the New York Times and The New Yorker. Her day is fully occupied, taken up by narrating audiobooks, starting when she enters the foam-insulated recording booth situated in her home office.
Whelan grew up in Salem, Oregon, with a firefighter father and a homemaker mother, who divorced when she was a teenager. As an only child, Julia spent her time reading and playing make believe. She started acting in local theater productions when she was five. When she was fifteen, she performed in the ABC drama “Once and Again,” then in Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz’s sequel to “Thirtysomething.” After acting in “Thirtysomething,” she decided to switch to narrating audiobooks, after a friend’s mother offered her the job, which is where she is currently working.
Now one of Audible’s most popular narrators, she became friends with Taylor Jenkins Reid, who is the best-selling author of “Daisy Jones & the Six” and “Malibu Rising.” Whelan then narrated Reid’s “Maybe in Another Life.” “You have a lot of driveway moments with Julia,” Diana Dapito, Audible’s head for consumer content, said. Once you have started listening to her narration in an audiobook, you cannot stop, even once you have arrived home. A couple of years later, when the ideas for the audio version of Reid’s “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo” were brewing, Reid told her publisher that she wanted Whelan to voice a character. Reid pursued Whelan; a six months’ notice was needed for Whelan to come.
Now, after narrating many, many audiobooks, Whelan is starting a new chapter.
Whelan is starting to narrate her own novel: “Thank You for Listening,” based on her own life. A story still based on the audio industry and herself. A successful woman that works by telling the stories of others, like Whelan herself. The woman in the novel soon gets paired to read a famous romance novel with another well-off male narrator – Brock.
“Thank You for Listening” was an opportunity to peek into the audiobook world for listeners who lived outside of it – for those who did not take part in narrating. “It wasn’t until I got into the recording process that I realized just how meta the whole this is,” Whelan said. Whelan’s voice shifts constantly – different emotions can be felt throughout her speech. Whelan takes narration as a performance – without the eyes, you need to rely on the ears. “Narrating a book is really a performance, and it can be harder to do than acting, because I can’t use my eyes or a facial expressions to convey something to the audience.”
Whelan has certainly found her path – conveying what the eyes and face cannot, using language as an emotion. But right now, what we all can do in our free time is to listen to Julia’s works online, and let her voice drive us away into the audiobook world.
Whelan grew up in Salem, Oregon, with a firefighter father and a homemaker mother, who divorced when she was a teenager. As an only child, Julia spent her time reading and playing make believe. She started acting in local theater productions when she was five. When she was fifteen, she performed in the ABC drama “Once and Again,” then in Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz’s sequel to “Thirtysomething.” After acting in “Thirtysomething,” she decided to switch to narrating audiobooks, after a friend’s mother offered her the job, which is where she is currently working.
Now one of Audible’s most popular narrators, she became friends with Taylor Jenkins Reid, who is the best-selling author of “Daisy Jones & the Six” and “Malibu Rising.” Whelan then narrated Reid’s “Maybe in Another Life.” “You have a lot of driveway moments with Julia,” Diana Dapito, Audible’s head for consumer content, said. Once you have started listening to her narration in an audiobook, you cannot stop, even once you have arrived home. A couple of years later, when the ideas for the audio version of Reid’s “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo” were brewing, Reid told her publisher that she wanted Whelan to voice a character. Reid pursued Whelan; a six months’ notice was needed for Whelan to come.
Now, after narrating many, many audiobooks, Whelan is starting a new chapter.
Whelan is starting to narrate her own novel: “Thank You for Listening,” based on her own life. A story still based on the audio industry and herself. A successful woman that works by telling the stories of others, like Whelan herself. The woman in the novel soon gets paired to read a famous romance novel with another well-off male narrator – Brock.
“Thank You for Listening” was an opportunity to peek into the audiobook world for listeners who lived outside of it – for those who did not take part in narrating. “It wasn’t until I got into the recording process that I realized just how meta the whole this is,” Whelan said. Whelan’s voice shifts constantly – different emotions can be felt throughout her speech. Whelan takes narration as a performance – without the eyes, you need to rely on the ears. “Narrating a book is really a performance, and it can be harder to do than acting, because I can’t use my eyes or a facial expressions to convey something to the audience.”
Whelan has certainly found her path – conveying what the eyes and face cannot, using language as an emotion. But right now, what we all can do in our free time is to listen to Julia’s works online, and let her voice drive us away into the audiobook world.
