Voice Actor Carrington MacDuffie As The Voice Of "Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck"
My first feeling, not surprisingly, was joy when my literary agent told she'd gotten an offer from Brilliance for the rights to publish my St. Martin's Press book, "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck," as an audiobook. (Buy the audio book atAmazon; at B&N.)

My eventual feeling was terror -- thinking of all the cutesy pie-voiced female narrators out there. If there is anything my humor is not, it is not cute.

But I worked with Brilliance to give them ideas of what was important to me, and they came up with one voice actor -- Carrington MacDuffie -- who actually exceeded my hopes. (And I hear with some frequency that people really love her narration.)

As I wrote to Adrienne, who produced for Brilliance:

Thank you so much for the wonderful choice of Carrington MacDuffie. Exactly, exactly right in timbre and in the way she isn't cutesy. Also a voice I could listen to for hours, and I'm sure others feel the same. Very, very grateful!

Carrington and I have been following each other on Twitter and had a great phone conversation the other day. She is really interesting and also writes and performs music and is a babe. We hope to do a video of the two of us talking about the stuff of creative careers when she's in LA. At my request, she wrote a paragraph about her voice work and her voice work on my book specifically:

As a voice actor, you get cast according to the kinds of tone and timbre and emotional color you naturally express: quirky, serious, textured, melancholy, childlike, etc. My voice runs the range from mature, wise, authoritative, serious, to warm and kind, to sultry, to earnest, to imperious, to educated and classy, to dry and ironic. (That doesn't include character work, which encompasses a wider range and greater extremes.) Dry and ironic are why I was cast to narrate Amy Alkon's wonderfully wry and humorously barbed but still serious book. Tone is ever important in a narration job like this, where the author's voice and attitude are so strong, and her intent so energetically unalloyed. It's a matter of getting your mind inside the author's intent, and using the parts of your voice that match the personality revealed in her writing. With a book like this, it's a blast.

Here's a sample of Carrington MacDuffie reading from my book:

This morning, putting this YouTube clip into the piece, I was once again filled with gratitude for how Carrington does not cutesy-read. I was reminded of how Elmore Leonard would talk about how only Barry Sonnenfeld got his dialogue right -- in "Get Shorty." The characters read the lines straight. They don't mug to the camera after each line. They don't know they're funny. Which is what makes it funny.

And the face behind the voice:

More about her at her site, CarringtonMacDuffie.com, where there's a very sexy shot of her in cowboy hat.