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- [00:02]
Nate DiMeo
This episode of the Memory palace is brought to you by Acorns. Here we are at the start of a new year and if you like me, are kind of a resolutions person, but if you have a conflicted relationship with those resolutions, which is definitely me, listen like I want to self improve like the rest of us and it is challenging and you kind of wish that there was a way to automate them. Some program just got you up out of bed and got you to the gym. If one of your resolutions, and this is such a common one, is that you want to get better at saving money, that you just want to be on top of your finances and you want to build, I am going to recommend Acorns. Acorns makes it easy to start automatically saving and investing so your money has a chance to grow grow for you, for your kids, for your retirement. You don't need to be an expert. Acorns will recommend a diversified portfolio that fits you and your money goals. And you don't need to be rich. Acorn lets you invest with the spare money you've got right now. You can start with $5 or even just spare change. Head to acorns.com memory or download the Acorns app to start saving and investing for your future today. Paid non client endorsement compensation provides incentives to positively promote Acorns tier one compensation provided investing involves risk. Acorns Advisors LLC and SEC registered investment advisor. View important disclosures@acorns.com memory this is a.
- [01:21]
Betsy Brandt
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- [01:53]
Nate DiMeo
I'm Nate DiMeo. Three quick stories about the Memory palace audiobook a while back, maybe two years ago. I really don't remember. It is hard to remember when anything happens anymore. I was in a historic cemetery, which I realize is, you know, pretty on brand. I was in the granary burial ground in Boston where Sam Adams and John Hancock and the men killed during the Boston Massacre are buried during a beautiful summer day with my daughter. We had met up with our friend Sarah and her daughter and we were walking the freedom trail a little bit. You Know the painted path that guides tourists from historic site to historic site throughout the city. And while we were there, I got this call telling me that Random House was going to buy my book. I will not forget that phone call. And I will never forget seeing my daughter walking on the other side of the cemetery with Sarah and her daughter, kind of watching me have this phone call, looking expectantly to find out what clearly this good news was. I could see her walking between the headstones and the trees. And after that, there was a series of calls and zooms to figure out just what this book was going to be, including a particularly fun one with my editor and the publisher and a couple of deputy publishers. Lovely call, all. Congratulations. And, you know, kicking around ideas. And someone said, and your fans are gonna love the audiobook. And that stopped me in my tracks because I wasn't so sure you would. This book was always gonna be a mix of favorite stories from the podcast and news stories and illustrations and found photographs and memoir. But I couldn't help but feeling that if I were a fan of the show, if I were a listener, wouldn't a lot of these stories sound to me like a cappella versions of songs that I already loved in a different form? And I knew I needed a plan. And eventually I had an idea. What if I read all the news stories and then different people read the stories that have already been on the show? I listen to audiobooks all the time. I love them, and I love a full cast audiobook. So what if the classic stories, you know, the beloved stories, which is what I call them for marketing purposes, I will not be calling them old stories. What if they were read by a mix of voices? As a producer and as a person trying to figure out what the audience might want to hear, I started to think about some of the voices that I like the most that the audience might be excited about hearing. But as a writer, as just a guy who was then immersed in the wonderful experience of working on this book and noticing how much of my own life was in these stories, you know, my fascinations, small references to experiences that only I would ever really recognize, but yet their presence in those stories is so meaningful to me, what if I could populate the audiobook with voices that I love as a listener and even some voices of people I love? I knew it was a good idea and there were more ideas. I am an audio producer. I have. I recently realized that I have been doing this for, like, half my life, and I know what I'm doing. So what if I use this Shot that I have to make an audiobook and participate in this medium that I truly love and respect. What if I seize this moment and truly try to make something special, both for myself and the person who's never heard the show, but also for the listener to the podcast who might want a book for her shelf, but also want an audiobook for the car ride she takes to see her sister's family at the holidays. Something that would be filled with surprises. You know, not just different voices, but other elements that will only live in the audiobook. I wanted a big cast reading those classic, beloved, definitely not old stories, but me reading all the new material and all the pre existing material that had a particularly strong first person, but also things that would be exclusive to the audiobook, you know, so a remixed, fully scored story. There was one story in the book that would not work in audio because it just doesn't work if you don't look at the pictures. And so I ended up swapping that out for an entirely different story that only lives in the audiobook that kind of does the same thing, but with audio, which I'm really excited about. But first I had to convince Random House to do it. And it was one thing to get my editor on board. She's always so encouraging. But it was another thing to get the audio book team on board. You know, more voices is more money. And I mean, more than anything, it is more work. And it is work that as an audio producer for half my life, I know well. And so there was this point when I knew that their schedule, which would basically have them turning to the audiobook about a month away from publication, would not work with my idea. You know, all these voices, all this extra work for me would require time and scheduling and all this stuff. But I couldn't really get people to sign off on my little idea because they had enough on their plates with all the other books that were operating on their own proper timelines. So I needed something that would push the needle to get their attention, get them agree to this idea so that I would have time to pull it off. And I thought, what if I could land a voice that would be especially appealing to Random House? Like, is there some famous person I could get? So I opened up Twitter and I tried to figure out who my most famous follower is. It began that cravenly. But the next thing I know, I am dming Ryan Reynolds. Just out of the blue. I've never met this man. I love watching him. I thought he was dynamite in the Proposal. And definitely, maybe if you Guys know that one. It is a totally underrated rom com. So I send this guy, Canada's sweetheart, one of the most famous men on the planet, a message, and it says, I'll read part of mine. So, Ryan Reynolds, if I have been able to glean anything about you during all these years of enjoying your work across various forms of media, it is that you are clearly a person who's got a ton of time on your hands and is basically just lounging around unburdened by ambition or expectations. And so while I am reluctant to interrupt your leisure, perhaps you have some time to record a story for my audiobook goes on a little bit, but that's basically the gist. And I have sent this thing out into the ether, assuming I'm never gonna hear from him. But I just kind of feel good because, like, I'm giving it my all. I'm giving it a college try. Even a fool's errand will get you out of the house, you know? Five minutes later, the guy writes back.
- [08:23]
Betsy Brandt
He was tossing candy bars into the blue skies over Miami beach, watching them drop, and then their parachutes pop open and then tumble for a moment, then sway and then glide away.
- [08:41]
Nate DiMeo
So Ryan Reynolds reads a story in this audiobook, and he is so good at it. And because he said he'd do that, I was able to get the go ahead on my so crazy just might work plan. And so now I get to have stories that are read by, you know, some of my favorite voices in public radio and podcasts who are also so many of my favorite people. So these are Rishi Hiraway from SongXploders, Avery Trufelman, Daniel Arakon, Roman Mars, Jad Abramrod, Latif Nasser Kai Rizdal, my former colleague from Marketplace. There are three of my very favorite audiobook readers, like, people who to me, as an audiobook fan, like, feels like the biggest deal, including one of my dearest friends, Rebecca Lohman. There are a couple of my favorite actresses who have the most incredible voices, Lily Taylor and Carrie Coon, who over the years have reached out in their own way to say that they loved a specific story. And now they are in my audiobook reading those stories. And that is amazing to me. And also amazing to me is that my daughter reads the story Dreamland, and this was her favorite story when she was a little girl. And so now forever in this audiobook, there will be her voice at 15 and a half, and she is now 16. One last little story. So last week I was coming home from my book release event here in Los Angeles. It was a wonderful night and I will always remember it. But I suspect what I'm going to remember the most happened right after we got home. I was a little wired after this big day in my life and so had a little energy to burn. So I took our big dog, Goldie, as opposed to our little dog Walnut, for an extra long walk. It was a cold LA night. The wind had blown the clouds away so I could kind of see the stars, which is rare around here. I was flipping around on my phone through the audiobook, just getting a little bit of a flavor of each story, hearing each voice, these voices that I knew so well, reading my stories, what a thing that was. And I want to share one of those stories now. There is another actress I love. Her name is Betsy Brant, who I first knew from Breaking Bad where she played Hank's wife. And then, as happens from time to time when you live in la, I got to know her as a friend. And this friend of mine has one of my favorite Midwestern accents. And I have a Midwestern story that I knew she'd be perfect for. And so as I walked around in the dark listening to my stories being read by these voices I loved, and something about that making all of it the book, the audiobook, the kismet of it all, the achievement of it all just kind of feel real in a way that it hadn't until I was listening to these voices. Listening to Betsy, I was struck that this story that she reads is kind of a quintessential memory palace story. That kind of everything that I do and care about when I make these stories is kind of in here. So I thought it was a good one to share. So here from my audiobook is Betsy Brandt.
- [11:53]
Betsy Brandt
The Prairie Chicken in Wisconsin, Highlights of a study of counts, behavior, Turnover, Movement and habitat. There was the time in 1914 when Frances Hammerstrom was seven and told her mother she wanted to plant a garden behind their big brick mansion in the woods outside Boston. And her mother said, of course, gardening is a fine pastime for a girl. But Fran, she said, pronouncing the girl's name with the moneyed mid Atlantic accent of a Katharine Hepburn or George Plimpton or Mrs. Howell from Gilligan's island, the staff will dig the holes. Your job as someone who will someday run a household is to instruct the help as to where you'd like to plant the flowers and how. And then later, if you would like to cut some of those flowers for an arrangement to brighten up the parlor, bring some cheer to the landing on the grand staircase. Why, by all means, enjoy. Just be sure to wear a proper pair of gloves and to keep your hands free of dirt. But Frances loved the dirt. She loved bugs and birds and worms. Once one of the servants had fainted when she poured out cold water for a ladies luncheon and found tadpoles swimming among the ice cubes. A garden, well ordered and contained, her mother figured, would keep unruly nature out of her house and out of her daughter. So she smiled with approval as she watched her daughter through the back window, telling the gardeners how to place the begonias in neat rows, looking every inch a proper little girl and the future lady of the house. She did not know that Frances already had a secret garden out by the potting shed where she dug holes with her bare hands, collected insects she'd unearthed, put them in jars, pinned them and labeled them, planted rhododendrons so she could hide beneath them if anyone came looking for her. She realized she was resistant to poison ivy, so she planted a wall of the stuff around her real garden so no one would ever bother her there. Then there was the day she went to the dentist, and for a treat her governess took her to the Natural History Museum, and she saw all those insects and arachnids mounted and labeled with names Frances hadn't known, species she'd pinned at home but couldn't identify, and she loved it, and she cried when it was time to go home until the governess promised her she'd take her again the next time she went to the dentist, and there was the night the following week when Frances took a pencil and poked at her gums until they were gross and inflamed and her parents were alarmed and they told her she'd have to go right back to the dentist, and then they couldn't figure out for the life of them why she was smiling. There were all those nights when she'd wait for everyone to go to bed and she'd slip out her bedroom window and head out across the moonlit grass and lie beneath the stars and fall asleep to the sound of the night alive around her until she was awoken by the dawn and she'd hustle back home before anyone knew she'd been gone. There was the time before that. She was about 5, when her family was on a grand tour of Germany and a famous actress, some beautiful stage star, came to visit and lit a cigarette, flouting her father's strict rules against smoking inside, and Frances was sure her father was going to go ballistic. But instead he scrambled to find an ashtray. And there was the time when she was 84 and looking back on her life and remembered how she became determined to be like that woman one day, so famous she could make her own rules so she wouldn't have to hide. How odd she was, how unlike other people. Few people, she'd write, really held my attention. It was the birds and mammals, reptiles and insects that filled my dreams and internally whetted my curiosity. For nine years, on Saturdays in the ballroom at the Milton Club, she learned to dance and all that went with it. The entrances and exits, the curtsies and steps. How to hold one's head and one's partner's hand. Where to look, where not to look. How to twirl but not too fast. How to smile but not too wide. To prepare for a future of balls and cotillions as the wife of a diplomat or a man who owned factories. But no one ever asked her to dance. There were more girls than boys and the boys didn't quite know what to make of her. She sat by the wall and watched and waited. Then she'd go home and return to her secret garden to be alone with all the things she kept hidden away. Her sick animals, her cigarettes, her rifle and ammunition. And to lie in the grass and dream of Africa and the Amazon. There was a night, years later, when she had to tell her father she'd flunked out of Smith College. She couldn't be bothered to be interested in things that weren't interesting. All the preliminary courses and well mannered nonsense. Her father told her she would need to get a job. Then, perhaps assuming she would repent, slink back to him asking if he knew anyone at Mount Holyoke or Vassar. She got a job. She became a model. The only marketable skill she had was wearing dresses. There was the night she went dancing. She was 20 and boys wanted to dance with her then, especially when she wore her red velvet dress. And one young man, tall and handsome, came up to talk to her. He told her how he wanted to be a scientist, a naturalist, and to study animals in Africa. And she asked him if he wanted to get out of there. They went down to the beach and the pier where people like them didn't go, where there were honky tonks and hot dog stands and the place where they spun sugar into cotton candy. And they wound up at this joint where they played jazz. They had never heard jazz before, but they soon found their rhythm and they danced until the sun came up. Frances thanked the bandleader on her way out, saying that it had been the best night of her life. Three nights later, three nights after seeing her in her red velvet dress, Frederick Hammerstrom asked Frances to marry him. She asked what had taken him so long. And there was the time that Frederick's grad school advisor said there was a job working with animals for both him and Frances. The job wasn't in Africa or the Amazon, as they'd hoped, but in Wisconsin they would study prairie chickens. And then there was the day they showed up at an abandoned farmhouse on the Wisconsin prairie and her high heels clacked on the frozen ground. In the mornings, they'd start a fire and wait for the room to get above freezing and celebrate if it was warm enough that they couldn't see their breath. During the days, they'd go out looking for prairie chickens, studying their ways, trapping and branding them, day after day, season after season. Some days she would stand in front of an ornate antique mirror they'd brought with them out to the Midwest and see if she could still curtsy. Other days she got letters from her mother reminding her how to set a table when they were entertaining guests, should she send more dessert forks. And she'd laugh at how much her life had changed. There was the night the pump froze and there wasn't any well water and not enough snow to melt, to drink or to wash, and they needed to light a fire to unfreeze the pipes. So she soaked her red velvet gown in kerosene and burned it and knew that her old life was over for good. And good riddance. There were 21 years in which they studied the Wisconsin prairie chicken, struggled to understand why they were dying off, why they were on the brink of extinction, when they weren't being overhunted like buffalo or the passenger pigeon. Two decades of hosting grad students and volunteers, sometimes dozens at a time, who'd marvel at Frances and Fred and how they seemed one with each other and one with the land, immune to the cold and to boredom. Their visitors would be slack jawed when rugged Frances showed them her curtsy or recalled some cotillion or other strange story of society life that seemed to come from a whole other life entirely. Some nights the wind would howl and scare their two children, born to a fine family, but born to the prairie. Some days they couldn't believe how fast the children had grown and how happy they were out there in the wild. There was the time Fred's doctor told Frances her husband had pancreatic cancer, and the day not long after, when he died. And there were times when she read tributes to her husband and to the work they did together, how it had saved the prairie chicken, how the two of them were people who'd figured out that extinction didn't come only from overhunting, but could be caused by habitat depletion. In their decades, tromping through the low grasses of Wisconsin, they developed an approach to studying animals that is common sense now, but was revolutionary then. It was interdisciplinary. Zoology needed botany, which needed meteorology, which needed limnology, and on and on. They realized you couldn't understand what was happening with the chickens that ate the seeds without understanding the plant that dropped the seeds, or the creatures who burrowed beneath the seeds, or the stream that fed the seeds. They learned that the prairie chicken needed the prairie itself to survive. They discovered that all the prairie's creatures, its bugs and its grasses, its birds and its trees and its creeks that froze over, all the countless little things combined somehow to give the species life. They were all connected. And when she was 90 years old, a few years before she died, there were trips down the Amazon and to Africa. Frances would listen to the night and think of her husband and their 59 years together, and of her life before, and the countless moments and choices, big and small, and the days, unmarked or wholly remarkable times, remembered and lost, that combined somehow to make a life. And she would fall asleep beneath the stars.
- [22:08]
Nate DiMeo
This episode of the Memory palace was produced by me, Nate DiMeo in December 2024. Audio Excerpted courtesy of Random House Audio from the Memory palace by Nate DeMaio read by a full cast excerpt read by Betsy Brandt Copyright 2024 Nate DiMeo Published 2024 Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved. This show is a proud member of Radiotopia, a network of independently owned and operated podcasts from PRX, a not for profit public media company and a 501C3. So if you are making your end of year donations and you want to support independent media and what I do at the Memory palace, now is the time. Go to Radiotopia FM if you want to follow me on Instagram and threads. I am there at the Memory palace podcast on Twitter which is basically collapsing right when I could have used a robust social media platform to share information about my book and various appearances. But no, I'm at the Memory palace there. I'm also the Memory palace on Facebook. I am on Bluesky now as Nate demeo and I, if all this wasn't complicated enough, have a substack at the Memory palace podcast Zod Substack. And if you ever want to shoot me an email, you can do so at one more address. That is Nate. TheMemoryPalace us. I'll talk to you soon.
- [23:47]
Betsy Brandt
Radiotopia from prx.