Happy 30th Birthday, First Comes Love: Behind the Scenes of the New Audiobook 

Thirty years after its publication in 1996, my memoir First Comes Love is available for the first time in unabridged audiobook form from Penguin Random House Audio. Along with recording the audio, I was given the opportunity to write a new introduction to the book, which also appears in the updated print edition. The audio dropped on December 9. The paperback with the new intro will follow in about two weeks.

The recording studio selected for the project was Baltimore’s Clean Cuts, tucked away at the end of Chestnut Street in Hampden, where an engineer named Nick met me each morning with hot tea and a comfortable set-up in a room with a microphone and a music stand. On one wall was a large window overlooking his workstation in the next room, an array of boards, mixers, and other recording equipment. On another, there was a large flatscreen, where the project’s director, Rebecca Soler, joined us from New York via Zoom. We worked in three- and four-hour shifts, with a break for lunch, and though they had booked three full days for the project, it took us less than two. (The final audio came in at about seven and a half hours.) I was sorry to be finished, I would have happily gone on in that peaceful place reading books aloud to Nick and Rebecca for days on end. 

Rebecca is an experienced actress and audiobook narrator, and she gave me encouragement and advice as the recording proceeded. Because I’ve worked for decades in radio and podcasting, and also recorded the audio of one of my other books, The Big Book of the Dead, I was experienced in reading big chunks of materials without breaks and knew how to fix little mistakes as they occurred. Once in a while, she would ask me to try a different read than the one I had given — almost always just by slowing down and giving important words and sentences more chance to land. After we recorded the last few chapters, she told me she had gone through a whole box of tissues. 

After we all recovered from that, we did an exit interview about the process using questions supplied by the publisher. Pieces of it will be used in their “This Is The Author” podcast. Here are a few of those questions and answers, along with one they didn’t ask.

Tell us about your book. What inspired you to write it?

My book First Comes Love is a memoir of my relationship with a beautiful gay ice skater named Tony I met at Mardi Gras in 1983. We had an amazing and very unconventional love affair, lived together in New Orleans and Austin, Texas, and got married in 1986. Shortly before our sons were born, Tony tested positive for AIDS, and he died when the boys were six and four years old, in 1994. I wrote this book to preserve a record of him, of us, of all the different aspects of our story, both dark and light. 

Honestly when I wrote this book I was still trying to get my mind around what had happened, how it had happened, to have a place to put all the huge feelings I was left with. And in retrospect, 30 years later, I can see that First Comes Love is also one little piece of a bigger story, the story of all the people we lost to AIDS in peak years of that epidemic.  

If you had to describe the recording process in one word, what would it be?

Thrilling. If I had three words: So much fun.

When the book was first published in 1996, audiobooks were known as “books on tape” and were often greatly abridged for that format. I did record one of those, but I was so unhappy with the edited version of the story that I was glad when cassette tapes went out of common use and it disappeared. 

Now, with the new technology of digital recording and smartphones, audiobooks are taking over the world. So when a student of mine, actually a trans woman who had many points of connection with the story, was incredulous that there was no audio, I started wondering if there would be any way to make that happen, perhaps in honor of the book’s 30th anniversary, which was coming up in 2026. 

I poked around on the internet and found an email address for the president of Penguin Random House Audio, to which I wrote an email suggesting the idea. I was sure this email would go no further than a spam folder. But a couple of days later, I heard from the backlist manager, Tara Hart, saying that PRH would be happy to do this. She further told me that Vintage, the book’s paperback publisher, would release a 30th-anniversary edition alongside the new audio, and that they invited me to write a new introduction to the book which would appear in both the print and audio version. I was over the moon. These days in the studio were the culmination of this process, and also an amazing opportunity to revisit a long-ago part of my life and myself.

Is there something specific you’re excited for listeners to hear? What was your favorite section to record and why?

I loved every second but if I had to pick a favorite, it would be a tie. On one hand, the first chapter, which is where we arrive in New Orleans for Mardi Gras and I describe the experience of falling in love at first sight. Reading my descriptions of Tony, how handsome he was and how cool, gave me chills. I also got to write a lot of fun stuff about New Orleans itself, surely one of the great cities to try to capture on the page. The other chapter I looked forward to reading, sort of nervously, because it comes in a pretty dark part of the story, is the one called “Tony in the Garden.” Here I tried to overcome the limitations of only being able to tell the story from my point of view by writing from Tony’s perspective. A pretty big risk for memoir, which is ruled by the conventions of nonfiction.

How did you prepare to record your audiobook?

I prepared for the audiobook recording by reading First Comes Love for the first time in many decades, partly to get ready for the audio but also to write the new introduction looking back on the experience. It was an intense time, and I had sort of blocked out some of the most difficult or shocking parts. The whole thing was like 67-year-old me was getting a chance to visit with 35-year-old me, and you can hear that in my voice in the recording — amusement, disbelief, anger, and sympathy, as I express the thoughts and feelings of the headstrong, passionate, and sometimes brutally honest young woman I was back then.

Bonus Question: Is the audiobook different from the print book in any way?

In the new introduction, I talk about this rather upsetting thing that happened around the time the book was published. The publicists excitedly reported that I’d been invited to appear on Oprah Winfrey’s afternoon talk show. This was before she had her book club, and I had never heard of an author, other than a cookbook or self-help author, appearing on her show. Adding to my hesitation was that I’d been told that the segment’s focus was going to be “straight women who married gay men,” and the producers wanted me to help them find other guests. But why would anyone who didn’t have a book to promote on the subject want to go on national television and discuss this?

Eventually I suggested a pal of Tony’s from the club scene who seemed to have at least one adoring female associate. But as it turned out, this guy talked to the producers not about that relationship but about his longtime affair with Tony. He assured them that I knew all about this, but I certainly did not. The evidence of my naiveté is scattered all through the book, with paragraphs referencing our scant intimacy and wondering at the fact that Tony had somehow become “asexual.” In the new introduction, I told this part of the story and mentioned that when I reread the book in preparation for writing about it, I underlined all those telltale sentences in my copy. 

But in the studio, about 2/3 of the way through the book, reading yet another embarassing instance of these clueless assertions, I stopped short. “Can I say something about this?” I asked Rebecca. She said, “Sure, go ahead.” And so there’s a bit of fourth-wall breaking in a chapter called Earthquake. “Okay listeners,” I say, and I explain that I really, truly didn’t know what they surely have already figured out. 

I was excited that they let me leave it in the finished version!

If you would like to download the audiobook, I recommend Libro.fm, as sales from that site benefit independent bookstores rather than Jeff Bezos. But you can get from his little shop as well. There are a few events scheduled to celebrate the release of the new print edition coming up in January:

• Baltimore: January 8^th, 6 p.m.: The Ivy Bookshop, in conversation with Laura Lippman
• Austin: January 24^th, 4 p.m.: BookPeople, in conversation with Naomi Shihab Nye.
• Boston: March 3rd, 7 p.m.: Porter Square Books, in conversation with Joan Wickersham

New York is hopefully on the way. You can also read or listen to the new introduction at LitHub.com. To follow forthcoming coverage and events, sign up for my mailing list at marionwinik.com.