I wear the fact that I love musicals on my sleeve. Ladd, who frequently uses tropes like “Loving someone is a risk,” is a mellifluous speaker when Dern mimics her mother’s southern twang, it’s especially sweet. There’s a lot to take in here: Just talking the way they do about Ladd’s inevitable death is head-spinningly potent. There are even breathy coughs by Ladd, and I can’t tell if they’re on cue.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea that this audiobook could be considered a kind of performance just because the mother-daughter interaction is so real, so relatable, so raw, so fascinating. For instance, when Dern brings up incidents of Ladd slapping her at age 14, or when Ladd took her grandson Ellery to get a haircut while Dern and her ex-husband, Ben Harper, were traveling. Some of the discussion topics get really confrontational. As far as I understand it, the audiobook is not the original conversations, but a recreation of them. The walks happened before Dern even filmed last summer’s Jurassic World Dominion, and Ladd, at 87, is still very much alive. This book comprises a series of conversations between Laura Dern and her mother, the actress Diane Ladd, that occurred during the walks they took to build back Ladd’s lung capacity. Read by: the authors, with a foreword read by Reese Witherspoon The goal of this column is to try to send you on your way each month with a few of them. I find that the best audiobooks are experiences in themselves. Sometimes an audiobook doesn’t work because of the narrator other times the book is overcomplicated and confusing.

Over the years, I’ve learned that some books make satisfying listens and some just don’t. If I play Candy Crush while I’m listening to Pamela Anderson’s memoir, I’m accomplishing something, even if that accomplishment is absorbing Pamela Anderson’s memoir. You can go for a walk, drive to Florida, do laundry, put together a jigsaw puzzle, lie on your bed in complete and total despair. You can do lots of other things, all while enjoying one of the best books of the year. One of the great things about listening to audiobooks is you can. People will occasionally tell me they think listening to an audiobook is “cheating.” Cheating on what? Physical books? One of the great things about reading is you can’t do anything else while you’re reading.

Top audio books