Christa Lewis: The Body Behind the Voice

The audiobook narrator behind Pippa Jayne on finding a character's voice, performing romance out loud, and what breath adds to a story that the page can't.

Somewhere in North Carolina there is a padded room the size of a closet, and a woman goes into it alone and talks for three hours so that you can have one.

That’s the ratio. Three to one. A ten hour audiobook has cost somebody thirty or forty hours of her body, sitting in a chair, holding five people alive at once, keeping the room they move through built and standing while she does it.

And it is the body doing it. Not the voice, if we’re imagining the voice as some free-floating thing that lives in the throat. The jaw, the breath, the sinuses, the soft tissue of the face, the spine holding a position for hours. Every hour you listen to has been mastered three or four times over by a body you will never meet, and by the time it reaches you all of that has been sanded off. What arrives sounds like a woman simply telling you a story.

What stayed with me is what she said about the small space between the upper lip and the nose. It turns out that patch of the face is where we clamp emotion down, and that it can be unclamped, and that when it is, people weep. There is considerably more behind the phrase stiff upper lip than an expression.

I’ve been saying for a while that we live in a flattening time. I meant it about the culture. It turns out it also describes a face, and that some people’s work is the daily refusal of it.

The rest of what she told me is in the episode, and it’s better in her voice than in my summary. How she finds a character. What she does when she isn’t feeling it. And the thing she deliberately holds back from you, every time, on purpose.

Guest Bio:

Christa Lewis is an award-winning audiobook narrator, voice actor, and voice coach. Trained as an actor at Boston University, she spent nearly two decades living and working in Germany, where she read the news at Deutsche Welle in Berlin and later became the station’s promo voice. She has since narrated more than 350 books under her own name and as Pippa Jayne, the name that carries her romance, romantasy, and erotica work. She also coaches and directs other narrators, and works from a studio in North Carolina.