OTHER PEOPLE’S WORDS | Kirkus Reviews

An homage to two deceased friends and the ways in which their voices persist.

“In grief,” writes Soep, an audio editor, “our voices find life through the dialogues they contain.” When in graduate school at Stanford, the author and her now-husband, Chas, grew close with two couples: Mercy and Christine, then Emily and Jonnie. After decades of sustaining friendship, Jonnie and Christine passed away, the former in a freak swimming accident and the latter from an inexplicable illness. This book memorializes these relationships; of her and Chas’ interactions with Mercy and Christine, the author writes, “the four of us fell into a friendship that was no less a love-of-my-life because it crisscrossed two couples and didn’t last.” Soep heavily references Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, in whose work she finds liberation. “Inside our words,” she writes, “we are never without companions.” Soep’s memoir interweaves stories, her friends’ ongoing, remembered voices, and Bakhtin’s life and ideas, including his conviction, by virtue of dialogue, that “even death is but an incomplete departure.” Throughout the book, the author revisits former and ongoing dialogues with Jonnie and Christine, respectively. As life moves on for others following their deaths, Soep pays homage to their preserved—indeed, persevering and profound—presence as well as her own capacity to hear and imagine. “We have not yet reached the end,” she writes. Soep includes many pages of old email exchanges, which allows for a direct transmission of voices, albeit in a limited context. On Soep’s wedding day, Christine told her, “In conversation there will be the unspoken.” Now, the author finds that “there is also the reverse. In the unspoken, there is conversation.” She concludes, in part, “Every word is ours and other people’s at the same time.”

A genuine, highly personal, thoughtful memoir and memorial.