Other People’s Words: A Memoir of Friendship, Love, and Conversations with the Dead

What if the great love of your life is friendship?

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. Christine had been a writer, Jonnie a storyteller. Lissa couldn’t imagine a world without their letters, postcards, texts--a world without their voices. Then she found comfort in a surprising place. As a graduate student, she had 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. In a conversation with Emily, a familiar phrase was spoken, and suddenly, there was Jonnie, with his riotous laugh, vibrant in her mind. Mercy recited an Adrienne Rich poem in just the way Christine used to and, for a moment, Christine was with them in the room.

Other People’s Words shows us how we carry within us the language of loved ones who are gone, and how their words can be portals to other times and places. Language--as with love--is boundless, and Other People’s Words is an intimate, original, and profoundly generous look at its power to nurture life amid the wreckage of grief. Dialogues do not end when a friendship or person is gone; instead, they accrue new layers of meaning, showing how the conversations we share with those we love continue after them, and will continue after us.

Lissa Soep is Senior Editor for Audio at Vox Media and Special Projects Producer and Senior Scholar-in-Residence at YR Media (formerly Youth Radio). She has produced award-winning radio stories for NPR and other outlets that have advanced reforms in juvenile justice and child welfare, and since 2020, she has edited narrative podcasts with Vox Media for Apple, Spotify, Audible, and Luminary and established the Vox Media Podcast Network Audio Academy, a learning and speaker series for aspiring and veteran audio makers. For six years, Lissa was a part of the Youth and Participatory Politics research network, a group of scholars brought together by the MacArthur Foundation to shift the paradigm on how we understand and promote youth civic life in digital times. Lissa is a senior civic media fellow at the Annenberg Innovation Lab and advisor to the Civic Imagination Project at the University of Southern California. She has a PhD from Stanford, where she studied education, social theory, and linguistic anthropology with leading Bakhtin scholars. She lives in San Francisco.