Other People’s Words

What if the great love of your life is friendship? And what if your conversations with your friends could live on, even after they are gone? Award-winning journalist Lissa Soep’s mesmerizing literary memoir Other People’s Words: Friendship, Loss, and the Conversations That Never End (Spiegel & Grau, 2024) is reminiscent of acclaimed books like Kathryn Schulz’s Lost & Found, Melissa Febos’s Girlhood, and Hua Hsu’s Stay True, yet utterly original. Soep shows us a four-way relationship that is no less a love story because it crisscrossed two couples and didn't last. She exalts the love affair that friendship can be and shows that language—like love—is boundless and has the power to keep us connected to those we’ve lost. 

In their twenties, Lissa Soep and her boyfriend forged deep friendships with two other couples—Mercy and Christine; and Emily and Jonnie—until, decades later, Jonnie died suddenly in an accident, and Christine passed away after a mysterious illness. Lissa couldn’t imagine a world without their letters, postcards, and texts—a world without their voices. Then she found comfort in a surprising place. As a graduate student, she studied the philosophy of the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who wrote about the many voices that can echo through a single person’s speech. Suddenly, Bakhtin’s theory that our language is “filled to overflowing with other people’s words” came to life. Lissa began hearing Jonnie and Christine when least expected. A familiar phrase was spoken in a conversation with Emily, and suddenly, there was Jonnie, with his riotous laugh vibrant in her mind. Mercy recited an Adrienne Rich poem just as Christine used to and, for a moment, Christine was with them in the room. When Lissa noticed echoes of their words and intonations in her own voice, it could feel like an impossible visit. As Lissa writes in Other People’s Words:    

“Bakhtin taught me to notice layers of dialogue within our words, conversations humming with voices beyond those who are with us in the here-and-now. My relationship to Bakhtin formed along the edges of his books, through notes I crammed into the margins over decades. With time, he evolved from a scholar I studied to a spirit presiding over my deepest loves and losses. He showed me that it’s possible to daydream other people’s words into existence, to form speech out of silence. From Bakhtin, from Christine, from Jonnie, I discovered something essential: that language is teeming with voices, past and present, unruly and inexhaustible. That our words hold an ‘inner infinity,’ which is itself a consolation.” 

Blending memoir and scholarship and weaving her prose with fragments of letters, postcards, poems, voicemails, and other texts, Lissa has created an astonishing tribute to deep friendship and the enormous, heart-rending power of language to keep us company. It is a transformative story that will resonate with anyone who loves language and has experienced loss, which is to say, all of us.