How Jelena Dokic voiced her own literary story of abuse and healing
Jelena Dokic’s new memoir Fearless, covers the years since her father went to prison, as she tried to rebuild her lost fortune and her life. This time she’s literally ‘speaking her truth’.
‘I was raised and taught to stay silent,” says Jelena Dokic. She is referring to the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father, Damir, during her tennis career. Eight years ago, she found her voice, releasing a memoir, Unbreakable, which became a bestseller.
The follow-up, Fearless, covers the years since her father went to prison, as she tried to rebuild her lost fortune and her life, and this time she’s literally “speaking her truth”.
Jelena has voiced the book herself, for Penguin Random House Australia, available on Audible
“I think it’s very important, especially when you’re telling very personal stories, for audiences to hear you read the book in your own voice,” she tells Review.
Yet the idea of having the talent – the star, if you like – read their own memoir is relatively new.
When audiobooks first started, they were mainly read by professional voice actors.
But with memoirs, it seems that readers respond much more enthusiastically to a story being told by the person who lived it.
Huge celebrities, among them former US president Barack Obama, and his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, agreed in the early days of audio books to voice their own stories.
But it was Prince Harry who smashed it out of the park. He voiced his book, Spare – it’s the story of his boyhood, the death of his mother, and his romance with Meghan Markle – in his delightfully posh British accent, and Audible says an astonishing 50 per cent of sales of Spare in the first week of its release in Australia came from audio.
Additional research by the company revealed that more than 70 per cent of Australians who listen to audio books and podcasts (and that’s the majority of us, these days) prefer a book with an “appealing and engaging narrator” – and if the narrator is “familiar” to them, it’s even better.
“We get many people searching by narrator before they search for a title,” says Audible Australia’s country manager, Ben Rolleston. “We know it’s important in building that personal and powerful approach in a memoir.”
Jelena makes a direct appeal to listeners in her audiobook, saying: “To anyone struggling in your life, this book is for you.” The tale she tells is frightening, with beatings so severe that she was sometimes left unconscious.
The abuse, which began when she was just six years old, left her feeling suicidal.
Damir’s tyrannical regime, which also included denying Jelena food and water for days as a punishment for not playing well enough, left her with a severe eating disorder.
“I am not fully healed. I have not fully recovered. I am a work in progress, but I am a fighter,” she says in Fearless.
Damir was jailed in 2021 after he pleaded guilty to assaulting a Serbian official, according to media reports. He has since been released. In 2009, he was imprisoned after he threatened to blow up the Australian embassy in Belgrade and for having an illegal cache of weapons.
His daughter’s book, which includes reflections on her recent relationship breakdown, and the online trolling she has endured over her weight, made the process of recording the audio version deeply personal. “I recorded the book in three days. Because of my schedule, I spent 10 hours a day recording. Every word has to be said properly. Every time you rush over a word, you’ve got to do it again,” she says.
Jelena’s audiobook now lives and thrives on the virtual shelves, alongside works by fellow Australians with moving tales to tell, among them the food critic, Matt Preston, who has turned his memoir, Big Mouth, into an audio book.
For the first time in his memoir he had opened up about his personal life, with a tale every bit as surprising, funny and food-oriented as the man himself. “You don’t think about doing an audiobook (when you’re writing),” Matt tells Review.
“You certainly don’t think about reading your own audiobook. I think recording it was probably the hardest thing about writing the book … saying out loud these things, like family events or trauma that are often kept secret, like a monster under the bed. But when you shine a light on it, it tends to dissipate. When you reveal them openly yourself, they lose all their power”.
Both Jelena and Matt are grateful for the feedback from the listening audience, including people admitting that they too have had similar experiences or thanking them for telling their story out loud, to remove stigma.
“So many people have written to me telling me that it is great to hear the story in my voice,” Jelena says.
“There was a woman that told me she listened to my story while she was cleaning, and there was someone that told me they listened by the pool on a holiday. It’s amazing to get messages like that, to know that I’ve helped someone.”
