Review by Booklist Review
Soep explores what it means to carry the voice of a loved one after they have died in this moving tribute to her late friends, Christine and Jonnie. Following their deaths, Soep turned to the work of philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, finding solace in his ideas about language. "The living keep shaping their language around the voices of their dead," she writes, considering the ways in which we seek to communicate with and about those who have died. After Jonnie's untimely death, Soep hears his voice when his brother speaks, and his wife, Emily, listens endlessly to his voicemail messages. Christine lost her words in a slow decline unnoticed at first by friends and her partner, Mercy. But they filled the silence with words she would have spoken and engaged with her voice through the many messages she wrote. Soep writes poignantly of her friendships and deep grief, intertwining them with Bakhtin's life and work. Anyone who has lost a loved one and still seeks their voice will appreciate this pensive book.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
