I like when we get alternate forms of memoir/biography “reading,” aka podcasts for this week as it allows me to consider how each form can enhance or emphasize different aspects of storytelling. I was thinking a lot this week about Maria’s voice, the level of intimacy afforded when we can hear her pauses in breath, hear parts of her narrative where she may be smiling, more serious. There is both a distance to podcasts that is inherent from only hearing a voice and not seeing a speaker, but also a closeness that comes by being able to identify with their changes in voice, the ways these might reflect on our own faces as we experience the narrative.

I think this mix of biography and memoir was informative, but I had some mixed feelings about the personal memoir part in that sometimes the voice sounded honeyed or overly dramatic and less natural in the way Maria was telling her story of identity through Selena and her life/music. I liked the way she blended parts of her process into the narrative–there was a lot going on but in an interesting way. We were hearing how she came to make the podcast, who Selena is and was, why she is still relevant, and how she impacted the speaker individually. Many threads. I guess maybe some of the honeyed-ness that might’ve rubbed me the wrong way could be interrogated through the lens of persona which we have spoken about in narrative memoir/biography–how do we separate the narrator in a podcast from their persona? I find it harder because we’re hearing the story in their voice–perhaps this is a constraint but also a benefit of the genre and I imagine the way each podcast/narrative is received depends largely on personal preference. I’m curious how others responded to Maria; does our response to her affect how we respond to her story and eventually her subject, Selena?