Snippets of Michelle Williams’s narration of Britney Spears’s new memoir have proved explosively popular online. But what goes into selecting a celebrity reader for an audiobook?
It’s not clear how many takes it took to get that “fo’ shiz, fo’ shiz” just right in the recording studio. But however many it was, the actress Michelle Williams landed on a line reading that has resonated on social media.
The quotation in question is part of her five-and-a-half-hour audiobook narration of Britney Spears’s best-selling new memoir, “The Woman in Me.” And while audiobook memoirs are traditionally voiced by the authors, in an introductory recording, Ms. Spears explains that because of the “heart-wrenching and emotional” subject matter, she would not be providing her own voice-over.
Instead, it’s Ms. Williams’s voice that listeners hear. Although her impression of Justin Timberlake encountering Ginuwine was widely circulated on X, formerly Twitter, there are passages in the book that are somber. Ms. Williams narrates how the pop singer had an abortion while she was dating Mr. Timberlake, started drinking alcohol with her mother at age 14 and how she navigated her 13-year conservatorship.
Simon & Schuster, which published “The Woman in Me,” did not immediately respond to questions about how Ms. Williams was selected to read Ms. Spears’s memoir. But in the world of audiobooks, the idea for many such pairings often comes from the producers.
“I like to think of my job as kind of matchmaking,” said Sarah Jaffe, a senior executive producer at Penguin Random House.
Ms. Jaffe said she saw her job not as finding the most famous Hollywood name to narrate a book, but rather as casting someone who can help “connect the reader to the text.”
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