“If you knew how much work I put into getting the voices… “Oh, let me just tell you about me hanging out with famous people.”
That’s not an indictment, it just doesn’t really speak to me in a very wholesome way.
Her name is Charlotte Koh, she’s a Korean American woman who runs digital for Hello Sunshine.
Credit: Audible
And so she said, “You know Sophia, we might want to look at the book.”
Before the deal, had you already been a fan of audiobooks or podcasts?
I thought, “Oh my God, I know exactly what I can do here.”
I literally said on that first call with Audible, “I want Method Man in my memoir.”
And they said, “Okay, that’s fine, you’re free to do that.”
It’s the author’s voice.
Adding all of the additional voices was super exciting to me.
No one’s ever done that before.
That comes from looking for the Parental Advisory sticker on a hip-hop record.
I don’t want the clean version, I want the explicit version.
Of course, who wants to listen to the clean version?
Voicing an audiobook is a bit like being a rapper.
Did you ask the Wu-Tang Clan or any other musician friends for advice on your vocal performance?
No, I didn’t need to, because I have already been doing public speaking.
I’ve been lecturing.
I understand that I have so much power in my voice, and that’s both figurative and literal.
So no, none of them had to coach me on that.
With that said, did you treat making the audiobook like a performance?
Did you write the passages thinking of how they’d be spoken aloud?
“This reads well, but it doesn’t really work spoken.”
So there was some of that.
But other than that, I didn’t.
Can you expand on whyLean Indidn’t resonate with you as a woman of color?
That was certainly a criticism leveled towards it upon its release.
Look, there’s stuff in that book that absolutely resonated with me, [like] imposter syndrome.
It wasn’t until I started to read more about it that I understood what you’re talking about.
I couldn’t really articulate it until somebody else articulated it for me, if that makes sense.
Sheryl Sandberg is a is truly a brilliant woman.
She is Harvard educated, she went to business school, she’s the COO of Facebook.
She speaks from a place of tremendous privilege, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all.
That’s not an indictment.
Again, it just doesn’t really speak to me.
I think the criticism is that it didn’t really address any intersection.
What does that mean?
Yeah, we understand what that means.
In other words, I don’t enjoy the same privilege.
In my memoir, it was clear that I acknowledge my privilege.
Look, I was raised and still have a middle class safety net.
I am college educated.
I’ve never known what it’s like to be hungry.
I’ve never been afraid that my children will be homeless.
So I was very conscious of that in my writing, but yes, absolutely.
Sheryl Sandberg didn’t speak to me insofar as my identity, and identity is everything to me.
What is your advice for young people of color, especially women of color, looking for mentors?
Michael Ostin is my mentor and has been for 32 years.
And there is no doubt that I am where I am largely because of his mentorship.
Now, I want to define mentorship a little bit.
And I have people in high places so to speak.
And I only access those people for myself, my friends and my family and my mentees.
And I just think, “Man, what if she had a Michael Ostin in her life?
She’d be running the fing world right now.”
It’s never been presented to them as a practice.
Yes, because there would have been a commonality of experience.
That’s no kind of betrayal to me.
That’s no selling out.
That’s aligning yourself with power.
Just start asking, and maybe you get a No, so, who cares?
Keep it moving and go on to the next person.
So, I would say if you’re looking to mentor, yo choose a woman of color.
Has working on the Audible Original brought you closer to anyone?
Yeah, I think one of the gifts has been that it has brought me closer to people.
It was a really nice way for us to share memories together.
I have bonus content at the end.
I knew that I wanted to do that with my memoir.
So at the end of my memoir, I have some stuff that’s kind of like outtakes.
But then, I have these amazing conversations with some of the guys.
That’s so cool.
Yeah no, my conversation with Raekwon and with Ghostface Killah literally made me cry.
They’re like, “No, we’re not surprised at all.”
And I also asked them, “Why did you guys choose me?”
And Rae and Ghost answered that question in a way that’s just heartstopping.
Yeah so this process, that’s what brought me closer.
I literally could not get through it.
I was sobbing, I was crying so hard.
That’s right.”
And it was just so moving.
The Baddest Bitch in the Roomis available exclusively on Audible startingtoday.
Listen to an exclusive clip above.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
