Andy Corren is not your typical audiobook narrator, which is evident the moment you turn on Dirtbag Queen (Hachette Audio, 10 hours and 4 minutes), a memoir of his mother (aka “the ravenous and ravishing red-headed Renay”). Corren’s Southern-fried nasal twang and tongue-in-cheek, high-drama declamatory style are as distinctive as the tale he tells and the turbo-charged language he uses to tell it. “Every friend I made in 22 long North Carolina years called me Jewboy,” he informs us, adding that his brothers were commonly known as Twin, Asshole, and Rabbi. Set in the relentless heat of Fayetteville (with a head-spinning interlude in Japan and sojourns to Miami and the Outer Banks), many of Corren’s stories revolve around his mother’s fruitless attempts to forestall eviction by working jobs at the local bowling alley and Sunoco station, as well as having a newspaper route and a mobile pot dealership. Other stories highlight their unique mother-son relationship; they spent hours together on her waterbed, where he rubbed her feet and she called him “Ann.” By the time he gets to his coming-of-age as the only male member of a teenage girl gang and the reappearance of an older sibling who’d grown up in a Florida institution, you’ll be hooked.
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For another unique voice, and a very different mom, cue up Whoopi Goldberg’s Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me (Blackstone Audio, 6 hours and 43 minutes). Whoopi’s rich, throaty, matter-of-fact, and straight-outta-Manhattan delivery, along with the associative style and candor of her storytelling, makes this audiobook an unusually intimate experience. (In fact, there are so many ad libs and additions in the audio version that an updated paperback edition is planned for 2026.) Whoopi’s mother, Emma Johnson, had her share of difficulties, including a mental health crisis that caused her to essentially disappear for two years when Whoopi, then called Caryn, was 8. Johnson emerged from this period to become a critical role model and saving grace for her daughter, instilling in her a profound sense of agency and self-confidence, later helping to raise not only Whoopi’s own daughter, Alex, but also her granddaughter, born when Alex was just 15. Whoopi tells the whole story with a blend of rue, incredulity, and something like pride.
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British Pakistani actor Art Malik pinch-hits for Hanif Kureishi on the audio of the latter’s memoir, Shattered (HarperAudio, 6 hours and 9 minutes), thus becoming another link in the chain of people who made it possible for Kureishi to create and share this extraordinary diary of his life in the year following a fall in December 2022 that left him completely paralyzed. From very early on, his partner, Isabella, and son Carlo took daily dictation while an armada of doctors, nurses, carers, and other friends and family provided essential support. Like his friend Salman Rushdie, who documents a very different near-death experience in Knife, Kureishi details the grim realities of his physical situation, here compounded by an even darker prognosis and daily, even hourly, humiliations. Yet these diaristic entries also include wonderful meditations on writing, reading, sex, the arc of Kureishi’s career, the effect of racism on his identity, and the possible upsides, if any, of catastrophe. As our critic put it in a starred review, the memoir itself ultimately becomes a vehicle for “refashioning his life…with grace, dignity, and black humor.”
Marion Winik hosts the Weekly Reader podcast on NPR.
