Lissa Soep is the author of the new book Other People's Words: Friendship, Loss, and the Conversations That Never End. She is senior editor for audio at Vox Media and she lives in San Francisco.
Q: What inspired you to write Other People’s Words?
A: I started writing this book after a visit to my friend Christine near the end of her life. She had almost entirely stopped speaking — she only had a few words left — and yet during our time together, at a care facility where she was dying, I sensed her presence, her voice, her poetry, in such an incredibly vivid way.
On the cusp of losing her, I heard myself speaking lines of her language. “Can you stop chatting, so I can concentrate?” I said, imagining her response to my incessant chatter when she was trying to focus on the stack of photos I had brought for her to look through from our friendship over the decades.
“Lissa, what’s gotten into you?” I said, giving voice to the dismay she must have felt when I kept telling her I loved her, again and again — a phrase that embarrassed her, but I couldn’t help it.
In the two words she did speak in that final visit, “brown eyes,” I heard a lifetime of love and heartbreak for Mercy, her partner of 17 years, whose eyes are black coffee, dark and warm, and who had come as well for final goodbyes.
The feeling at this visit was hard to make sense of, this mix of loss and vitality, silence and voice, a never-ending conversation that felt no less real for being mostly unspoken.
It made me think of my other friend, Jonnie, who had died not long before in such a different way, all at once. A speeding boat ran over him when he was swimming in a lake in Montana.
“Where is he? No, really, like where actually is he?” his wife, my friend Emily, kept asking, in the days, weeks, and months after he died, and she listened for his voice wherever she could find it, produced it when she needed to.
In voicemails saved on her phone — “Hey Sugar, it’s me, I’m just calling to check in on you.” In letters she wrote to him on birthdays or big days for their kids. In sessions with a medium. In our shared remembrances of his booming laugh.
Writing the book felt like a practice of honoring these two friends, the ones they left behind, friendship itself as a great love, and language as a life-giving force that can sustain us in the face of death.
Q: The writer Peggy Orenstein said of the book, “Other People's Words is one of those books that changes you forever. Now I can hear the ‘double voicing’ in my own life: the ways the language of my past...has fused into and shapes the language of my present; how it keeps people I have lost with me always.” What do you think of that description?
A: I love it. Peggy has written beautifully about her own relationship with her father as dementia came over him at the end of his life, so it meant a lot to me to know that the idea of “double voicing” resonated for her.
I have long been obsessed with dialogue — between people and, more surprisingly, within our own words. In the book, one of my main jobs was to fine-tune into the voices-upon-voices that echo through our speech, across our lives and maybe especially through times of loss.
I love how Peggy names this possibility of hearing something in our own voices that was there all along, but that we didn’t always notice. I love how she brings time into it, and I love her use of that word, “fuse,” which captures the capacity for language of the past to shape language of the present.
Something I learned living these experiences and writing the book: inside our words, we are never without companions.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: The first part of the title, “other people’s words,” is a phrase I lifted from the philosopher whose expansive theory of language threads through the book.
“Our speech is filled to overflowing with other people’s words,” wrote Mikhail Bakhtin, a scholar I studied in grad school whose ideas became a liberation to me when I experienced the loss of my two beloved friends.
From Bakhtin, I learned to sustain vital conversations by lacing their voices, remembered and imagined, into my own. And I learned something essential about language itself: that it’s teeming with voices, past and present, and meanings too unruly and inexhaustible to pin down—an "inner infinity," which is itself a consolation.
Q: What do you hope people take away from the book?
A: I hope that this story of friendship as a great love will invite readers to reflect on relationships in their own lives that have defined them in ways that the world might not always recognize.
I hope that the simple observation I draw from Bakhtin — that our speech is “filled to overflowing with other people’s words” — is as transformative for readers as it has been for me.
I hope that readers going about their everyday lives will notice a phrase or even just an inflection in their voices that brings to mind a person they love, and that the experience will feel like a visit that sustains them.
I was so moved by author Rob Delaney’s response to Other People’s Words. He said that the book “illustrates how absurd the illusion is that we are separate. We don’t just whisper into each other’s ears; rather we speak to, through, for, and as each other.” How freeing and expansive, if that awareness is something readers form in conversation with my story.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: One thing I’m just starting to work on is the audiobook, which is fascinating and deeply meaningful for me, in part because I’ve spent most of my life making stories with sound. I’m a radio and podcast editor and producer. I love working with voice and other audio elements to bring a story alive.
There are real creative and ethical challenges in figuring out how to use audio to convey the change in Christine's writing: the proliferation of punctuation (strings of periods, exclamation points, question marks where her lines fall off mid-sentence); her increasingly unconventional use of capital letters; the fragmenting of her words into rows of letters as the dementia takes hold.
These typographical details are key to the development of Christine's voice, both in real life and in the story, and I love thinking through ways to do justice to these nuances and expressions of self.
Apart from Other People’s Words, I'm working on a small project called Bonus Chapter, researching and experimenting with bringing the creativity of narrative podcasts to literary nonfiction audiobooks, so I've given a lot of thought to the challenges and opportunities for narrative resonance as we move between text and sound, and what all this means for the future of writing, reading, and listening.
It’s great that the timing is working out so I can do some of this thinking within my own process of translating Other People’s Words for the ear.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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