Lissa Soep, OTHER PEOPLE'S WORDS: Friendship, Loss, and the Conversations That Never End

Totally Booked with Zibby

Zibby Owens

Connection, Inspiration, Moms, Entertainment, Arts, Reading, Books, Parenting, Literary

4.4 • 602 Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2024

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Zibby speaks to author Lissa Soep about OTHER PEOPLE’S WORDS: Friendship, Loss, and the Conversations that Never End, an intimate, original, and profoundly generous look at the power of language to nurture our lives amid the wreckage of grief. Lisa shares the stories of her friends Christine and Jonnie, whose early and unexpected deaths deeply impacted her, and how she found solace in their words and memories. She and Zibby discuss the intricacies of friendship, the ways in which language keeps loved ones close after they’re gone, and the journey of publishing this deeply sentimental book.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Zivie Owens, and I am the host of this podcast. Moms don't have time to read books.
0:08.1	I am also a newly minted USA Today bestselling author of the novel, Blank.
0:14.2	I've created a whole community of book lovers around this podcast, a publishing company, reading retreats, a bookstore, and more. Learn more
0:22.2	at Zivimedia.com or follow me on social at Zivie Owens or join the community at Zivie Readers.
0:31.4	Lisa Soap is the author of Other People's Words, Friendship Loss, and the Conversations
0:36.0	That Never End. Lissa is a senior editor
0:38.8	for audio at Vox Media and special projects producer and senior scholar in residence at YR Media.
0:44.6	She has a PhD from Stanford where she studied education, social theory, and linguistic anthropology
0:49.8	with leading Bactin scholars. She lives in San Francisco.
0:53.4	Welcome, Lissa. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to
0:57.3	discuss other people's words, friendship loss, and the conversations that never end. Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.
1:05.2	Oh, thrilled to have you. Can you tell listeners a little bit about this book, why you wrote this book, the losses that
1:12.2	inspired it, the intellectual thoughts that you wove throughout? Just tell me about the structure
1:18.5	and all of it. So people have a sense.
1:22.4	Absolutely. Yes. So other people's words started when two friends of mine died around the same time about 10 years ago in very different ways. So Christine died slowly after a long and deceptive illness that did a lot of damage to her mind and to her relationships before she finally got a diagnosis and it
1:47.5	ultimately ended her life. Johnny died suddenly all at once. He was swimming in a lake in Montana and a boat
1:55.2	ran over him and he didn't survive. So the book is a story of these friendships, these loves and these losses. And it's really
2:04.0	also a story about friendship itself as a great love in our lives that often doesn't get the same
2:11.1	recognition as other intimacies that define us. And I know this is something that you have written
2:16.9	and thought a lot about as well.
2:18.6	And it's about what it feels like to have lost these friends for me, and then to have found them
2:24.8	again and again through language. So the sort of shapeshifting power of language in the face of
	...

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