About this Event
Zibby's Bookshop is thrilled to host Lissa Soep as she celebrates the launch of her new book, OTHER PEOPLE'S WORDS. Lissa will be joined in conversation by Laurel Braitman, PhD!
About the book:
What if the great love of your life is friendship?
In their twenties, Lissa Soep and her boyfriend forged deep friendships with two other couples—Mercy and Christine; and Emily and Jonnie—until, decades later, Jonnie died suddenly, in an accident, and Christine passed away after a mysterious illness. Christine had been a writer, Jonnie a storyteller. Lissa couldn’t imagine a world without their letters, postcards, texts—a world without their voices. Then she found comfort in a surprising place. As a graduate student, she had studied the philosophy of the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who wrote about the many voices that can echo through a single person’s speech. Suddenly, Bakhtin’s theory that our language is “filled to overflowing with other people’s words” came to life. Lissa began hearing Jonnie and Christine when least expected. In a conversation with Emily, a familiar phrase was spoken, and suddenly, there was Jonnie, with his riotous laugh, vibrant in her mind. Mercy recited an Adrienne Rich poem in just the way Christine used to and, for a moment, Christine was with them in the room.
shows us how we carry within us the language of loved ones who are gone, and how their words can be portals to other times and places. Language—as with love—is boundless, and is an intimate, original, and profoundly generous look at its power to nurture life amid the wreckage of grief. Dialogues do not end when a friendship or person is gone; instead, they accrue new layers of meaning, showing how the conversations we share with those we love continue after them, and will continue after us.
About the speakers:
Lissa Soep is senior editor for audio at Vox Media and special projects producer and senior scholar-in-residence at YR Media. She has a PhD from Stanford, where she studied education, social theory, and linguistic anthropology with leading Bakhtin scholars. She lives in San Francisco.
Laurel Braitman PhD is a bestselling writer and professor. She is the author of the memoir (Simon & Schuster 2023) and the NYT bestselling book Animal Madness: Inside Their Minds. She received her doctorate in History and Anthropology of Science from MIT and is the director of Writing and Storytelling at the Stanford School of Medicine’s Medical Humanities and the Arts Program where she helps clinical students, staff and physicians communicate more clearly and vulnerably for their own benefit and that of their patients. Laurel is also the founder of Writing Medicine, the global community of writing healthcare professionals. Since March 2020 she has helped over 10,000 healthcare workers share their personal stories. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, Wired, California Sunday, National Geographic, Radiolab, National Public Radio and many other places. She lives on the ranch where she grew up, in Southern California.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
1113 Montana Ave, 1113 Montana Avenue, Santa Monica, United States
USD 0.00