Secret Thoughts

In The Madman’s Hotel by Niall Breslin, a descendant of Julia Leonard, a former patient in the now-abandoned St. Loman’s Hospital, reaches out to Niall, a mental health advocate, for help finding Julia’s body after almost all markers and crosses are removed from the hospital’s graveyard by Ireland’s health department, the owner of the hospital’s grounds. Julie’s determination to bury her great-grandmother’s remains next to her grandfather is surprising and remarkable given what little information she and her grandfather had about Julia.

It’s an interesting story that wants to be like other audiobooks where the narration is interspersed with snippets of interviews, but its bizarre editing style hampers and distracts from it. The audio editor frequently cuts off an interviewee’s answer with a hard fade while the narrator takes over speaking for them or over them. Sometimes the narrator even speaks over himself in his own interview. It’s as if the producers assume the listener doesn’t have the attention span to listen to the interviewee’s answer in their own words.

Alternatively, it’s possible the interview audio was so bad that it would have been distracting to use more of it. The interviews often sound as if they were conducted in an echoey room without the proper equipment to pick up clean audio. I’ve listened to audio books like this in the past, and they can be annoying and difficult to listen to. Even if that were the case, however, My Mom’s Murder’s approach, where the narrator repeats what the interviewee said when the audio is difficult to decipher, would have been a less distracting choice.

I frequently listen to Alok Kanojia, better known as Dr. K, on the Healthy Gamer YouTube channel. As a monk-turned-psychiatrist, his lectures, video essays, and Q&As cover topics in psychology and Eastern medicine, meditation, and practices.

His latest book 30 Days to Thrive with ADHD is an Audible exclusive and narrated by him. It’s much like listening to one of his YouTube videos/podcasts except more structured. The book features thirty strategies for managing common challenges those with ADHD face. The strategies and reasoning for them seem practical to anyone who has problems in the areas they address though. For example, if you can’t sleep because you’re restless, you may have missed your window for going to sleep. This window is when you’re tired enough to go to sleep but not so tired that your frontal lobe can’t control your thoughts and impulses to allow you to sleep.

I often wonder when watching videos on ADHD, autism, introverts, personality types, etc., are these symptoms, solutions, or tendencies really specific to this group? Or are they specific to unique individuals with or without a formal diagnosis in this group? Dr. K has more credentials than other random YouTubers and the misinformation they spread, but I still found myself asking these questions once in a while. Regardless, he shares practical tips that seem applicable to everyone!

My Mom’s Murder and My Mom’s Murder: Season 2 follow Lauren Malloy in her investigation into her mother’s unsolved murder after she was contacted by a stranger 30 years later. The audiobook is composed of Lauren’s narration and recordings of interviews she’s conducted in the years since her investigation began in 2020. Many of the recordings are of low-quality phone conversations, but Lauren does a good job of repeating what the interviewee has said when it isn’t clear.

At first, Lauren struck me as a journalist who happened to discover this bizarre event in her past. She is contacted by Louise, supposedly her mother’s best friend in childhood, who tells Lauren that her mother didn’t die of natural causes as she had been told her whole life but had been murdered. Lauren’s inclination to begin recording her calls with Louise almost immediately seemed like someone hunting for a story, and she so happened to strike gold in her own life. She also seemed adept at interviewing.

I also had theories that perhaps Lauren was a TikToker trained to find and record content to gain attention. This theory came from her mentioning that she shared her investigation and frustrations on TikTok. Occasionally, she has discussions with her best friend, who seems to be in the audiobooks only for Lauren to talk to (because a podcast is often more entertaining with two people than one). Lauren has also attracted the attention of the news in the past when she found and reunited with her long lost siblings or step-siblings several years before the events in this audiobook series. Perhaps she’s an attention seeker… but if she is, it’s for the purpose of tracking down her family’s mysteries.

It turns out she wasn’t a journalist or a social media influencer; she worked somewhere in the tech sector, and may still. What she does as a non-journalist, however, is impressive. She doesn’t trust Louise, often suspecting her of lying and even of being her mother’s murderer. Despite this, she talks to Louise as if they are friends for more than a year, all to coerce as much information out of her as she can. She treats other suspects and interviewees similarly, acting as their friend but secretly acting as a journalist, undercover cop, or detective. She built a large social media following for the purpose of forcing the police to take her seriously and reopen her mother’s cold case. Along the way, she built an organization to help others seek justice for deceased family members. She seems like she genuinely took all these roles out of a need to understand her family history, which is a common trait that’s impressed me about the narrators or interviewees of other audiobooks I’ve listened to recently like The Secret Daughter and The Madman’s Hotel.

At times, the audiobooks, particularly Season 2, feel more like a family gossip fest. Before the latest DNA results are revealed, let’s hear more gossip from Louise and everyone else who has an opinion on the latest turn of events! But perhaps this is because the murder is officially unsolved and the listener is invited to form their own theory from the conflicting evidence presented.

While Lauren judges all these people–who’s lying and who’s telling the truth?–as a listener, I’m also judging her, and like Lauren’s, my judgments changed quite a bit throughout the two audiobooks. Very meta. 😛