Audio Books →Other People's Words A Memoir of Friendship, Love, and Conversations with the Dead [Audiobook]

Soep traces intimacy and longing through everyday conversations, in fragments of text messages, letters, postcards, emails, poems, voicemails. Inspired by the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin's idea that our language is "overflowing with other people's words," Soep realizes that her friends' words, remembered and imagined, are portals to other times and places, to other versions of ourselves and the ones we love. Dialogues do not end when a relationship or person is gone; they accrue new layers of meaning, continuing to echo, speak, and guide us forward. As Soep discovers through this tapestry of conversations, language-as with love-is boundless. Our words are never locked into a single moment or limited to a single lifetime; they contain an "inner infinity." Other People's Words is an intimate, original, and profoundly generous look at the power of language to nurture life amid the wreckage of loss, in this moment and beyond.