Other People’s Words

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.

These book club questions are from the publisher, Spiegel & Grau.

Book club questions for Other People’s Words by Lissa Soep

Use these discussion questions to guide your next book club meeting.

Powerful friendships are at the heart of Other People’s Words. Do you have friendships that sustain you? How have they impacted your life? How have those relationships changed over time? Would you consider any of these friendships to be akin to a “love affair”?

Lissa writes in Other People’s Words, “Every dialogue will at some point be given new life.” Can you hear your loved one’s words after they pass? Are there any particular phrases you say that remind you of that person? Emily revisits her voicemails from Jonnie after his death, and they take on a whole new meaning. “Each of Jonnie’s messages was a dialogue, containing his voice from before, when he didn’t know what would happen to him or that he had so little time left, and the Jonnie of now, a presence that stretched beyond his death. Listening to the recordings, I let myself imagine that Jonnie really was still checking on Emily, making sure she was okay, calling her Sugar. His voice spoke simultaneously from the time before and after he died.” Do you have saved voicemails or texts that take on a new meaning after time?

“Our speech is filled to overflowing with other people’s words,” the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin wrote. Lissa gives the examples of a singer covering another artist’s song, or moments when she catches herself using a phrase her parents used. Can you think of any other examples of other people’s words at play?

At the end of Jonnie's memorial service, Jonnie’s loved ones are piled on a couch reminiscing about Jonnie at different stages throughout his life. His brother-in-law comes over to take a picture and capture the moment so they “have it for the slideshow at the funeral for whichever one of them dies next.” Mercy calls times like that “a present moment full of itself and full of tomorrow.” Is there a moment like that in your own life, when you sensed time collapsing, and the present and the past mixing together?

When Mercy opens the boxes Christine left for her, she finds a letter that she wrote to Christine decades earlier. “It was an envelope filled with Mercy’s own words. Letters from a different time, so removed from the person Mercy was now that they took on the quality of someone else’s voice. She could almost read them as someone else’s story.” Have you ever gone back and read an old journal entry? Can you identify with that person still? If you’re comfortable with it, share a passage with the group.

Are there particular phrases that you use that you associate with yourself? What are the words you’d like others to carry with them after you’re gone?

As she reads Bakhtin, Lissa Soep writes, “Inside our words, we are never without companions.” Does that ring true for you? Can you give an example from your own life?

Other People’s Words begins with the example of the wind phone in Ōtsuchi, widely used after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Tōhoku. Since then, other wind phones have popped up all over the world, including the U.S. Why do you think the concept is so universally appealing? What comfort does the idea bring, and how does it connect to Lissa’s concept of double-voicing?

Other People’s Words Book Club Questions PDF

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