Q&A: Bernadette Dunne

Bernadette Dunne has recorded more than 250 titles since her reading of Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha (Books on Tape [BOT], 1998) helped put her on the map. She's voiced the works of everyone from actress Katharine Hepburn (Me: Stories of My Life) to National Book Award winner Richard Powers (The Echo Maker), for publishers including BBC Audiobooks America and Christian Audio. Her Audie Award-nominated narration of Elizabeth Cohen's The House on Beartown Road (Blackstone Audio) was an LJ Best Audiobook of 2004. And her reading of Barbara Walters's memoir, Audition, was a Books on Tape Top Audio (LJ 11/15/08). You'll next hear her in Missing Mark (BOT, Jul. 2009), Julie Kramer's sequel to Stalking Susan, also read by Dunne and available from BOT.

How did you get your start as an audiobook narrator?

Audiobook legend Flo Gibson gave me a job monitoring readers in her studio in the Washington, DC, area [in the late 1990s]. I had a golden opportunity to observe and learn from the best: Flo, Kate Reading, Grover Gardner, and Michael Russotto.

You've said that "a new world…open[s] up with each new book" you read.

I think there is something completely wondrous in every [book] because someone you have never met had an experience or a perspective and shaped it into a story, a biography, or a history and put it out there to share with you.

When I'm recording, my "go to" question is: "What did the author intend to do here?" I think about the author as much as the individual characters. It's a personal relationship, between you and the author.

How do you bring dimension to every character?

One trick is to use people you know as a mental substitution. Then you are tapping into something that is just plain familiar, and that can be the key. Sometimes I find it opens up my understanding of the book as a whole.

What are some of your favorite past projects?

I was honored to narrate Betty Smith's classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (BOT, 2000). It pops into my head regularly, as I live in Brooklyn. I also loved doing Memoirs of a Geisha, one of my very first major recordings. Ayn Rand's essays, The Voice of Reason (Blackstone, 2008), were mind-blowing to read.

What techniques do you employ in narrating different genres?

Fiction almost demands that you take a little license, just as the author has done, to create a dramatic situation. It's important not to intrude on the author's story while at the same time not to be too removed from it. Nonfiction requires less drama and more analysis of ideas. It's helpful to have a command of the subject. Your audience can "hear" confidence or insecurity. And narrating autobiographies comes with a special sense of responsibility. For example, Deborah Rodriguez's Kabul Beauty School (Blackstone, 2007) was so alive and so current that I felt I was recording it while the ink was still drying. That was such a compelling subject that I was mindful of the very real people for whom this is not a story, a book, but a life.

Any advice for the aspiring audiobook narrator?

Love books. Love words. Love stories. It's all about that for me. The requirements of the job may be vocal talent, acting training, and lots of practice, but in the end nothing replaces a love of reading.