How to Write the Voices of the Dead, with Lissa Soep

LISSA SOEP KNOWS HOW to reanimate the voices of the dead, and she is here to teach you how to get those voices into your memoir writing. As a senior editor for audio at Vox Media and special projects producer and senior scholar in residence at YR Media, she has co-led teams honored with Peabody, Murrow, Kennedy, IRE, Gracie and other awards, and knows what it takes to make a great story. She put that knowledge to work in her new book, Other People’s Words: Friendship, Loss, and the Conversations That Never End, just out from Spiegel & Grau. Listen in and read along as we discuss how to write the voices of the dead.

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Marion: I’m delighted that you’re here, and this glorious new book reminds and informs us that we carry within us the language of loved ones who are gone and how their words can be portals to other times and places. So let’s set this up for the listeners a bit. As a graduate student, you studied the philosophy of Russian critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, a semiotician and scholar on the ethics and philosophy of language. He wrote about the many voices that can echo through a single person’s speech. His theory is that our language is “filled to overflowing with other people’s words.” And this book is that idea come to life as after the death of two friends, you began to recognize their phrases, their cadence of recitation in other conversations and realized how we carry within us the language of loved ones who are gone and how their words can be portals. So if you would, give us a bit of an intro to Bakhtin and your introduction to the work and continued interest in his work.

Lissa: Absolutely. I love the way you’ve summarized the book. I deeply appreciate hearing you mirror back to me what it was that I’ve been trying to do in these pages. So thank you for that. It is true that I encountered Bakhtin when I was in grad school, as you say. I happened to be in a class with one of the people that I write about in the book, my friend, Mercy. So she’s both a character in this story, essential character in the story. She was also sort of an intellectual companion with me way back then when we both first met Bakhtin for the first time. So I was immediately captivated with what Bakhtin had to say about language, and as you said, this notion that our speech is filled to overflowing with other people’s words. Though at that time, I think I was more engaged with his ideas academically.

I was working on my dissertation and I was doing discourse analysis in my dissertation. So I was doing very close, fine-grained study of moment to moment interactions and Bakhtin’s ideas gave me a window into understanding that language, even lines of speech that look like monologues are really shot through with dialogue. And this kind of radical belief in the dialogic nature of our voices is what Bakhtin had to say back then. And what turned out for me to be so much more than an academic idea, as you say, when I lost my friends and started to need to hear their voices and long for their voices and sometimes notice their voices when I least expected them in ways that I found profoundly consoling in that period of loss. And also noticing that within the community of others who were left behind when Christine and Johnny died.

Marion: It’s just an extraordinary concept and deeply comforting. And many of us encountered someone in our academic lives that we’d like to have percolate up in a book idea perhaps. And my listeners are writers who have ideas that they frequently talk themselves out of writing. So combining the work of a philosopher with a memoir that includes the deaths of two important people in one’s life might be one such idea that someone might think is too hard, too lofty or too, I don’t know, something, right? So take us back, please, to the germ of this idea and how you, I don’t know, gave yourself permission, forced yourself, absolutely didn’t have to force yourself because it was just organic for you, but how you moved it along to thinking there was a book there.

Lissa: There are so many moments that I was sort of starting this book. What was the origin story of this becoming a book? And I think there are different places that in my own imagination I can look back and point to and say, “Oh, that’s one of the places when it began.” And one of the places, for sure, was on a flight home from my last visit with Christine, my friend who died. And it was a visit when I knew that she was getting ready to die, and she had very few words left by the time I flew to the East coast in order to have a last goodbye with Christine. And what struck me about that visit, what didn’t surprise me, of course, was how incredibly sad it was to be with her knowing that she was so close to the end of her life and so much of language had left her.

But what surprised me and what I didn’t know how to make sense of at the time was the sense that her voice was so unbelievably present, even in her relative silence. And I felt so very much like her words were flooding our time together and her remembered words, her imagined words, the words that I spoke on her behalf when I was sort of uttering both sides of our conversation as we sat together. And on the flight home, I just was free writing. And even frankly before the flight home, even when I was in the presence of Christine, I thought of Bakhtin. I really did. And I thought of this notion of our speech filter overflowing with other people’s words. And so even at that very beginning stage of this book idea, Bakhtin was with me. And you know what was so fascinating is, again, very early on in my process, I reached out to a professor, Caryl Emerson, who is one of Bakhtin’s, the great experts and translators of Bakhtin’s work in the US.

And I didn’t know her, and I just cold emailed her and she wrote me back within hours as I recall. And she had just lost her parent and she shared that with me and she said Bakhtin was with her in her loss. So in a weird way, I don’t want to create an impression that Bakhtin’s ideas are accessible, because they’re really not, his writing is dense and challenging. But even with that, between Caryl and me, I just realized there’s something here that can enter a very intimate moment of loss and provide something. And so I think that’s where the idea to bring Bakhtin into it came to me.

What I had to learn the hard way was how to do that as a story. Because I had been trained as an academic, I worked as a journalist, so I knew how to make an argument using theory on the one hand. I also knew how to tell a story with characters and scenes from my work in journalism, but I didn’t quite know how to make a book that did both at the same time. And I didn’t really have that voice yet when I started. And so I really had to study a lot of other writers who did that work skillfully and came to this notion that I needed to bring Bakhtin into the story in a three dimensional way so that when I was citing him, it wasn’t just parenthetical citations the way you would read somewhere academic, that he was present in the story and we know about him and his past and his friendships and his ideas are like living, breathing moments in the story as opposed to plunked in a scholarship.

Marion: Yes, it’s not plunked in, it’s not troweled in, it’s not forced in. In no way do we feel that you are academically speaking to us. In fact, for me, there was the loveliest of feelings reading this book that combines that great cosmic “Aha” with the “Oh yes”. And then the heartfelt “Thank goodness, thank goodness what I’ve kind of suspected is true.” And we don’t have a word in English for the confirmation, consolation as well as succor this book provides, but that’s what I experienced treating it. So first off, thank you for that. I’ve got a lot of dead in my life who I hear in places and I didn’t have a place to talk about that with.

But in Other People’s Words: Friendship, Loss and the Conversations That Never End, you have a perfect setup. In the hands of another writer we might get lost, right? You combine memoir, a Russian philosopher, friends of yours who have died, correspondence and language between you and an argument that solidly reassures us that even in grief we keep close to those who might otherwise we might think we’ve lost. And I think you achieve it with the book set up, setting upon our noses the lens through which to read the entire manuscript. So I’ll let you explain via that Japanese phone booth you used to open the book, what it is, that phone booth, where you found out about it and how you decided to fit it to the front of your book.

Lissa: So I found out about it one day while I was at work in our newsroom, years and years ago. I’ve been working on this book for more than eight years. And a friend of mine who is also both a journalist and a lyric essayist, so has a brilliant ear for story, her name is Sean Wen, and she came into the office and plunked down her backpack and said to me, “Oh my God, Lissa, you have to hear this story. I was just at the gym on the treadmill crying.” And it was a story that she heard on “This American Life” from the reporter Miki Meek about this telephone booth that Miki Meek called the “wind telephone.” And so it was interesting, because Sean didn’t even know I was working on this project. She just was so taken by the story and had an inkling that I would be too.

So, the story of the wind telephone reported in “This American Life” is one of a man who lost his cousin. He lived in a coastal village in Japan, and he lost his cousin and he was in grief and he wasn’t ready to stop talking to his cousin. So he installed an old fashioned phone booth in his garden overlooking the ocean, and he would go into this phone booth and pick up the rotary phone, as Miki Meek reports, and talk to the cousin. And then with this phone booth in his backyard, a tremendous tsunami hit and thousands of people went missing and were killed along the coast in villages like his. And soon people who were grieving those losses, their loved ones who died or had gone missing, found their way to this phone booth. And they started lining up and having conversations with their beloved dead.

And sometimes the conversations were mundane, like, “Oh, I joined the tennis team,” or “everything’s fine at school.” And some were, of course, full of pain and longing and beseeching loved ones to come home. And this image of the phone booth is that their words were carried on the wind. And so when I listened to the story and I listened to these conversations, these sort of impossible, magical, mundane conversations, it just really resonated with what I was noticing and experiencing in my own life and loss and what I was noticing in the ways that the closest beloveds who were left behind by Christine and Johnny, that would be my friend, Mercy, who’d been with Christine for 17 years, and my friend, Emily, who’d been married to Johnny and they had two small kids together, I also noticed the kinds of conversations that happened in that phone booth in their lives in a really prominent way. And so that was why I felt like this image was such a rich one that could open the story and then could sort of recur. And so it shows up again and again, this notion of words on the wind throughout the book.

Marion: And it works. It works. And it’s not a long opener, it’s a short opener and it has tremendous impact. And you follow the phone booth story with this line from the end of the next section when you write, “Language is teeming with voices, past and present, and meanings too unruly and inexhaustible to pin down an inner infinity, which is in itself a consolation.” And I think that word, consolation, beckons us in. This is not a memoir about speaking to the dead, but more about reanimating them and keeping them with us. It’s an extraordinary distinction, but it also has to have made a fascinating book pitch. So when you went to pitch this to your publisher, Lissa…

Lissa: Oh, my Lord.

Marion: I just keep picturing this meeting or book proposal or however, but I just wonder if you can help the writers listening here about pitching something that’s not your straight memoir per se, but is. Because it’s argument based, it’s not plot based. I always say that memoir is an argument based genre.

Lissa: Interesting.

Marion: It’s deeply personal, right? It’s memoir to the core, but it has this other aspect. So do you remember what you first said when you pitched this book?

Lissa: Well, the first pitch was to my agent.

Marion: Yes, of course.

Lissa: Tina Bennett. And I was very fortunate in that I had a friend who was Tina’s author, Danielle Allen. And so I stirred up my courage to reach out to Danielle, who I knew from a very different life, not anything related to sort of literary or deeply personal narrative, which as you’ve said and as is obvious, this is, but Danielle Allen was somebody who, she’s a professor who wrote a very personal book called, Cuz. So there’s some ways in which she is up to something similar that I aspired to at that time, this idea of a personal narrative with a big idea at the center.

And also yet, and Danielle kind of moved between sort of writing for academic audiences and then writing for the public in a really powerful way. So I sent over, at that time I had already written a chapter or two, or no, I think I had written a treatment. I think I had written a treatment, and I’ll say that I always had a couple of jobs at the same time that I was working on this. I never was dedicated in terms of professionally, I was never waking up every day and working on this project. So it was a little bit private for a long time.

I used to call it “projét”, I wouldn’t even call it a book. I had this joke where I would just call it “projét”, kind of “Targét”. I wouldn’t even let myself call it a book. And that’s partly because I frankly wasn’t a hundred percent sure it would be a book because I also work in radio, so I was like, maybe it’s a radio story. I didn’t know what it was, and I wanted to keep myself open and I didn’t want to jinx anything, and I didn’t want to be presumptuous that it could become a book someday. But in any case, I think I did in those sort of private hours on Sunday mornings and stuff put together, if I’m remembering correctly, I think what I shared with Danielle was a kind of proposal that I kind of assigned myself. I think that’s what it was. And in any case, she very generously read it and said, “I’d like to introduce you to my agent, Tina Bennett.” Which was thrilling, couldn’t believe it. Kind of platzed on the floor of the parking lot where I just parked my car when I heard back from Tina.

And she said she was interested in wanting to talk. And if I’m remembering correctly, and I think I am, in that initial email from Tina, I’m pretty sure that Tina used the word, consolation. Or consoling. I think she said she found the work deeply consoling. And that was incredibly important to me. Not only was it affirming to hear that, but I think to your point, it kind of gave me a framework of what this book was doing or what it might have the potential to do, this notion of consolation. So I don’t even think I necessarily went in with that goal or vision, but I think she gave me that word. And from there, I was able to kind of add that to the framework that I was starting to develop as I was putting this idea together.

And then I will say that, I mean, the iterations, this is I’m sure true for most writers, but I mean, it’s gone through so many iterations and just lots of rounds of getting feedback, getting rejection, and really Tina and really good friends of mine who are brilliant writers stuck with me and helped point me in the right directions so that by the time we got to Spiegel & Grau, I think we had figured a lot out. And then the beautiful, lucky, wonderful thing is that Cindy Spiegel studied literature in a PhD program and knew Bakhtin’s work and so-

Marion: Fabulous.

Lissa: In our very first conversation, we were bonding over what we loved from Bakhtin. And so she immediately could see how there was potential to take these ideas that are hidden behind the walls of ivory towers and allow them to break free and reach the rest of us who have something meaningful to find in them.

Marion: I love that. I love the synchronicity, I love the development. I love the projét. Can’t even quite call it a book yet. Yeah, that’s very respectful. And I think that is the process many of us go through as we think up something and then we have to inhabit it. And there’s a lot of that discussion about inhabiting in this book. I’m introduced to the idea of ventriloquating, and it closes the gap for me that I’ve always worried about as a writer. I’ve published four books, I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words, and I teach writing and work with writers all day, but I always have this worry that nothing I do is an original idea.

There’s this weird moment sometimes where I think, oh, and I’ve worried about the distance between the writer and the language she’s using. Whose is it? And is she merely borrowing everything? But you explained that ventriloquating combines two Latin words to mean speaking in the belly. And something in me was so deeply consoled and reassured that these words that I use are passing through me. And you give a fine example of a laying on sound that passes from your grandfather to your father to you. Would you mind repeating it here, please?

Lissa: Oh yeah. So my dad is originally from Boston, and he has over the years kind of shed his Boston accent and no longer lives on the East coast even. But every once in a while when he gets tired, instead of saying soda, he’ll say sodar. He’ll add an R to the end of words, which is so peculiar for somebody who’s not from that part of the country. And suddenly, when I hear that word, the shape of that word come from my dad’s mouth, I suddenly feel utterly transported to being a child at my grandfather’s dining room table where he would always serve me mocha chip ice cream. And it was just a time travel. It was a portal to another time that’s gone. My grandfather was gone, my childhood is gone. And all it takes is this little pronunciation.

Bakhtin said that intonation is the most subtle kind of quality of language to bring about other people’s words. This just tiniest little shade of a hint of a presence is enough to unlock a whole world of memory and to kind of collapse time like a wrinkle in time where I’m suddenly imagining my father as a young man I never knew who spoke in a different way, being in the presence of my grandfather who died so many years ago, remembering what it felt like to be a child myself. So that’s one example of how you can take this tiny kind of feature and it suddenly opens a world.

Marion: It does. And I think all of us have those, and I think you percolate them up for us. I have one, my dad was a lot older than my mother, so my grandfather was born in 1881. My father was born in 1907. My grandfather was a poor, very poor Englishman, and spoke with a Northwestern English accent. And instead of saying the word, choices, he said, churces. And I have a daughter who’s adopted from China, and when she says, “churces,” which she does, this reanimates this laying on of language, going back all the way to this personal history. And I love it and I feel it, but my question for you is, how does it affect you as a person and as a writer to have this level of vibration? I mean, does it stop you in your tracks some days? Once you’ve written about it I doubt it stops happening to you, this real-

Lissa: Oh no, it happens more.

Marion: Yes.

Lissa: You notice it more. I have two thoughts on that. I mean, one is, and I write about this just a tiny bit in the book, but my sense is that that vibration is especially pronounced around loss and missing. But it doesn’t only happen in those conditions. So for example, if you’ve ever been in couples counseling, right, and suddenly you are triangulating a language in your most intimate moments that involves you, your partner, and this third voice that is giving you new phrasing, new ways to kind of hear one another, speak to one another, respect one another, that can feel embarrassing when you’re using language that’s not really your own. And yet it also can carry you through a difficult period and sort of establishing new ways to speak and hear one another as you need to. So that’s one thought about it continuing to show up for me in a way that I have found really helpful to have greater self-awareness about what we can do with words and how very crowded they are with different voices and people and histories.

The other thing I would say that I don’t get into as much in the book, but I feel keenly aware of, which is we’ve talked a lot about other people’s words being consoling. And of course, it is also true that other people’s words can be haunting and harmful when you hear a running soundtrack of words that have been painful to you, that have hurt you, or a voice that has taught you to condemn aspects of yourself. And if that voice is a presence within your own, that’s a burden. So I think there’s more one could do in unpacking some of these ideas to really explore the full spectrum of how it feels when other people’s words enter our own.

Marion: Oh, that’s a lovely discernment. I’m so grateful for that. And I think it’ll help a lot of people to consider whose voice it is and what they might like to do with it. So let’s talk a little bit about context and how we provide it. You do a tricky thing here by including emails, voicemails, notes from people who have gone before. This demands exquisite curation without which readers are kind of handed intimate correspondence and left to figure out what to do with it. And I work with memoir writers all day long, and I talk to them about curation. But I think I’d like to enlist you here to teach them something about it. So talk to me about the process of undertaking curation through this kind of correspondence and how to decide what to leave in and what to leave out.

Lissa: Yeah. Well, first I need to credit another writer friend of mine, Liz Weil. She’s a magazine writer, and I asked her to read an earlier version of this manuscript that didn’t have as much of the correspondence in it. And she was the one who really helped me figure out who am I in this story. And you named it. I am a lens into language. And holding me to that discipline where she said to me, “Ask yourself, why are you here in each of these scenes?” Not only as a character in these relationships, because of course a big part of the story is that these are all loved ones of mine, but from a memoir point of view, I’m also eyes and ears into this sort of flood of communication, and I maybe have a way of tuning into that language that would be helpful for readers if I can sort of offer that in every time that I’m noticing or observing something.

So that was kind of a refinement of my own voice. And then the second thing that she said that was so helpful is she said, “Look, if you’re telling me that this is a story in a book about voice, and you’re telling me about all the language that is swirling around every interaction and all the writing that is accumulated to form these intimacies, I need to see it.” She’s like, “So if you say Mercy and Christine would write to each other each night or after dinner,” she’s like, “what did they write to each other? Or if you say that Emily, after Johnny died, would write to him on his birthday and on other important moments where she would maintain a conversation with him or she would find other ways to tap into the voice that he left behind, what did that sound like?” And so she really pressed me to be fuller in my curation of those texts.

And so it just meant going back into the stores of my own email inbox and others where all of that correspondence lived. And even at the very end of the book where Mercy goes back into these boxes, two boxes that Christine had left behind when she knew she was dying, and the boxes were full of Christine’s writing and Mercy’s writing that Christine had saved. And we did that together. We don’t live near each other, but in real time, she opened the boxes again and was going through and sort of re-experiencing what was in there, and in some cases encountering what was in there for the first time, and then narrating that live on text with me and sharing what it felt like. So that turned out to be an incredibly, well, first of all, really emotional experience for all involved, I would say, and also a really important ending to the book.

But in terms of your question about curation, I will say, that is one thing that I feel I have been professionally prepared for outside of a life as a writer in this kind of literary vein, because I have been trained to deal with materials. That’s my favorite thing to do, is take in all these materials and find the moments that are most revealing and telling. So to me, that’s a joy. That process of figuring out what’s in and what’s out and finding the right moments to include, it feels very kind of organic and sculptural to me to just see what shape is needed and strip away what distracts. And I don’t know, I just really love that process.

Marion: Well, you did it very well because I talk people out of it all the time. They say, “Oh, I have my parents’ love letters from World War II and I want to publish them.” And I say, “But we have no context for that.” You’ve got to curate them. You’ve got to pull out just what fits in this story. And your friend was absolutely right, of course, we need to see the language that they exchanged. It was a great, great gift to encourage you to put in more.

Lissa: I agree.

Marion: So as we wrap this up, I always ask the same question when I have a memoir writer in an interview, and it’s this, what are we asking a memoir writer to do when we ask her to go back and write about a trauma? Are we asking her to relive it, reanimate it, or are we asking her to stand back coolly and report it from here?

Lissa: I think that question hits for me more kind of profoundly around what are my responsibilities to Mercy and Emily’s traumas and Johnny’s sister, Jean, and his brother, Pete, and the children and others who loved the people I’m writing about, who organized their whole lives around the people I’m writing about, who knew them through the time that they were children themselves. Which was, I didn’t get to know Christine or Johnny when they were kids, but there are people in the world who did. So when I think about that question of navigating around trauma, I think what was such an important commitment for me throughout the writing of this book, and one that I hope and pray I did right by, is sort of holding the trauma of others with care.

Marion: Beautiful answer. Thank you. Thank you for this book. I’ve actually carried it with me to keep it close and that I hope you understand how very much I enjoyed it and kind of grew to need it. So thank you for writing it and the best of luck with it.

Lissa: Thank you so much. That means a lot to hear.

Marion: The author is Lissa Soep. The book is Other People’s Words: Friendship, Loss, and the Conversations That Never End. Just out from Spiegel & Grau. Get it wherever books are sold. I’m Marion, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Jacqueline Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project where writers get their needs met through online classes and how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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