2018 Best Audiobooks: Memoir (via AudioFile Magazine)

I’m thrilled to be partnering with AudioFile Magazine to announce the winners of this year’s Best Memoir Audiobooks. As you know, I enjoy listening to memoir, and I know many of you do too.

To see all the winners in all the categories for AudioFile’s 2018 Best Audiobooks, be sure to click through to their multimedia AudioFile Ezine.

What follows is a quick overview of the what each of the winning memoirs is all about about plus a quote from the magazine’s review about the narrator. To see the full audiobook review, click through the link, which will lead you to AudioFile’s website.

• In Becoming (Random House Audio, ~19 hr), Michelle Obama talks about her childhood and her journey from private life to a very public one. Obama's “signature quiet confidence comes through every word as she narrates her story.
• Deborah Levy, in The Cost of Living (HighBridge, ~3 hr), talks about how she found inner growth and clearer insight after being battered by personal loss. “Henrietta Meire's intimate narration gives flesh and blood to Levy's sketches.”
• Tara Westover’s Educated (Random House Audio, ~12 hr) recounts how she managed to break away from her fundamentalist, home-schooled upbringing to attend college, learning about the larger world and going to earn advanced degrees. Narrator Julia Whelan “conducts a master class in the fear, dread, and self-doubt wrought by domestic violence.”

• In Going to the Mountain (Hachette Audio, ~7½ hr), Nadaba Mandela recounts the many ways his grandfather Nelson Mandela shaped his life from boyhood to manhood. Michael Boatman’s performance “captures the wonder and gratitude” Ndaba felt for his grandfather’s guidance.
• Cecile Richards’s memoir Make Trouble (Simon & Schuster Audio, ~9½ hr) is aptly titled. This is the story of the life an activist, from anti–Vietnam War demonstrations to fighting for women’s health care as president of Planned Parenthood. Richards reads her own memoir “with energy, enunciation, excellent pacing, and emotion.”
• Reporter (Random House Audio, ~14 hr) by Seymour M. Hersh takes us behind the scenes and into the mind of one of great investigative journalists of our time. Narrator Arthur Morey “adopts a conversational tone exactly suited to the material.” For more on this audiobook, here’s a short video from Morey. 

To learn even more about the don’t-miss audiobooks of the year, be sure to follow AudioFile Magazine on Twitter (@AudioFileMag), like them on Facebook (@AudioFileMagazine), and check out their new podcast (Behind the Mic with AudioFile Magazine).