The Words We Leave Behind (with author Lissa Soep)

0:03Don't hold anything too tightly. Just wish for it, want it, let it come from the intention of real truth for you and then let it go. For me, our soul is like it's unbound. It's limitless. But we will use words to limit ourselves. When people stop believing that somebody's got your back or Superman's coming, we turn to ourselves. And that's where you become empowered. Courageous participation attracts positive things. I'm Gwyneth Paltrow, and this is the Goop Podcast, where we bring together visionaries, scientists, healers, artists, and seekers. I'm so grateful that I get to interview these extraordinary thought leaders and share their wisdom with you.

0:51And I love listening to the conversations that are led by my co-host and dear friend, Cleo Wade. Cleo is a beautiful poet and author. I deeply admire her and the way she keeps her heart open to the world. Together, we believe that engaging in open-minded, honest, and sometimes difficult conversations has the power to change our lives. All right, over to Cleo. My guest today is Lyssa Soep. Lyssa is the author of the book, Other People's Words, which as Lyssa shares today is a book about friendship, grief, and what it's like to lose friends and how to find them again and again and again through the language that they leave behind.

1:35In this book, Lyssa explores the ideas of Russian philosopher Mukail Bakhtin, who believed that her speech is filled with the reverberating voices of others. After losing two of her close friends in different ways, Lyssa discovered traces of their voices and language through their voicemails, letters, and emails. She also discovered how these ordinary messages took on a different meaning after loss, allowing her to carry on a sense of connection and dialogue with her friends. I'm so grateful to have been able to sit down with Lyssa today. So let's get right to our chat.

2:15Lyssa, we have talked on this pod, or at least my episodes have, about grief so much, whether we meant to or didn't mean to, or there was a therapist, a grief counselor, a therapist, talking about it. And I was saying to a friend at dinner last night about your book is because we have kind of come into the conversation from lately, a kind of clinical approach. It was so refreshing to have this really, it's spiritual because it's so human approach to grief and loss in your book. And I was saying, a friend said something to me about someone in the restaurant. And I was like, you know, let me just tell you something.

3:01The best thing about really diving into someone else's world and someone else's stories is that all of the breaks we feel like we need from online this or commentary about this or, you know, all those topics in the world that are just overwhelming us, whether it's people talking about Ozempic or people talking about Taylor Swift or people talking about, you know, the things that just have risen to the top and that are being spoken about constantly. Yeah. to dive into someone else's world, as I did in reading your book, it was the greatest, it was a deeper relief than even, you know, an hour meditation or something like that, because all you're so, I'm so, it was so filled by your words, which I want to get into, because obviously the words and the language is such a big part of this, this book, but that it really pushed down all of that kind of noise.

3:54I feel that we're constantly trying to get away from, and it was just a reminder to me to put it short and simply to read, read more books that are other people's lives, you know, and how that is actually probably the medicine most people need the most right now. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for sharing that. And, you know, I don't want to say that it always felt like that writing it, but there were times like on Sunday mornings at seven, when I would like dart out of my house and go to a cafe to sit and write this book. Like it kind of felt like that to me too, because I was able to immerse myself back in these relationships that I missed and people I loved.

4:34And so, as I said, I mean, as you know, as a writer, like, it's not like it always feels so like luscious and immersive, but, but when it did, it felt a lot like what you're describing. So it's amazing to hear that it kind of could sometimes come through for readers. Yeah. The two people I bought this book for after reading it, one is a songwriter and the other is a studied theology at Harvard and both people who are really devoted to the divine of our existence. And so it was, thank you for writing it. Thank you. I'm excited to, But I'm excited to talk to you about this book. And in it, I know you explore the voices of our loved ones and the way they kind of carry through.

5:21And I think that there's not really a way to, you know, this book is a series. And I love the way that it's written because there is this kind of sweetness and melancholy and really slow feeling. And I love the way that you wrote it in these short vignettes because it does give the reader space to repace and melt in a little bit because there were times where it made me want to go into the other room and hug my kids or really have these kind of moments of reflection because when we're moving constantly and not really thinking about the gratitude we have of how the small moments lead up to our big lives, this is a kind of running meditation on the way these small moments are the personalities of the people we love.

6:09And so much of this, even I think it's on page two, you know, you bring in Bakhtin's theories and I'd love to kind of start with your discovery of Bakhtin, your relationship to him and his writing and his theories on language and words and our existence and non-existent. What the kind of invisible kind of world of language and spirituality and all the things. So could you talk to me about bumping into his work and the ways in which you've kind of adopted it to be, to kind of, it be the basis for how you move through writing this book? Absolutely. You know, other people's words is it's a book about friendship as a great love and what it feels like to lose friends and then to find them again and again through the language that they leave behind.

7:04And Bakhtin was really important in helping me to pay close attention to language in that way in order to experience it for all of its fullness, as you said, to continue to feel connected to people I loved, whom I had lost, and hopefully an invitation for readers to do the same, to sort of notice the intonations, the phrases, the expressions of people that we love. And after they're gone, the fact that their words are alive all around us, and even within us, even within our own speech, you know, the words of others is sort of rippling through and that can provide real companionship in times of loss and also just in carrying out our everyday lives.

7:52And so, you know, when I first read Bakhtin, it was decades before my two friends died, the two friends, Christine and Johnny, whom I write about in the book. I was in grad school. I was writing a dissertation. I was working on a PhD and I read this Russian philosopher of language. And I was immediately intrigued by his ideas. And I wrapped a lot of my sort of theoretical work around his contributions. So even back then I knew I was onto something special and it was sort of followed his obsession with dialogue. So Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher of language, 20th century, and he wrote about literature, and then he wrote about language in everyday life, and he was obsessed with dialogue.

8:35But he didn't necessarily mean dialogue in the conventional sense of like conversations between people. He was always listening for and tuning into the kind of conversations that are humming within our own speech. And so he had this line that I wrote down, you know, I'm sure I annotated the edges of his books. It's quoted in lots of things that I've written that our speech is filled to overflowing with other people's words. And that's like a radical idea in many ways, you know, and you can see it. He would write about, let's say Dostoevsky, and he would point to the ways that the author's voice would like shimmer in and out of the voices of these fictional characters he had created.

9:17Or he would write about, again, in ordinary life, that there's this double voicing that can happen, that we can speak in more than one voice at a time, that every word is half someone else's, Bakhtin said, you know, and that a word is both comes out of the speaker and it also is shaped by the person for whom it's intended. So all these really rich ideas about language. But it wasn't until I lost my friends. And I found myself with these missing voices. And I felt so much longing to continue to hear from my friends and to continue talking to them. And then I made this, you know, discovery that in itself was a kind of revelation that, as I said, their words were still present.

10:05And sometimes it was through traces of language that they left behind, like voicemail messages that, you know, Emily, Johnny's wife had on her phone that she shared with me or letters from Christine, who was very old fashioned and wrote postcards by hand. And so her penmanship would appear when I was like rifling through a drawer, or I would pick up a book from my shelf and I would see notes, annotations that had belonged to her. Or even, you know, as I said, in my own voice, the ways in which even frankly, like right now, honestly, I, when I talk about ideas or when I read aloud, anytime I read out loud, I noticed this sort of certain kind of cadence that is Christine's, you know, she was a teacher and she was a writer and somehow her kind of, her voice has made its way into mine.

10:58And that has provided real companionship. And Bakhtin was kind of like the almost like presiding spirit that guided me to notice this companionship within language. And so I ended up wanting him to be a voice in the book as someone who had these kind of really expansive, wild ideas about language, and also somebody who had his own backstory so that he could be his own kind of character alongside my beloved friends. Something I was really attracted to in the book was the ways in which you kind of note ritual being a part of these experiences. So whether that is in, in looking at Bhakti's life and recognizing the rituals of his salons and these conversations or these ways in which people would kind of gather around him or the, the Japanese telephone booth.

11:54And I'd love for you to share kind of why it was important for you to bring in things like that and those types of ideas or inspirations, I would say, even for you. And it's really interesting as the reader to watch you go from stories about people you don't know personally at all to then dive into so gracefully these really intimate personal memories. And so So I'd love to understand technically how you found your way into that. And then I'd also love for you to share about, you know, the kind of conversation circles and then the telephone booths and the ways in which I think the telephone and the speaking into the wind is something that felt so, you almost felt that it kind of created wind in your book throughout the entire experience of reading it, this idea that you're throwing this into the wind.

12:52And I'd love for you to tell, talk to me about those. Absolutely. I'm so glad you brought up ritual because, you know, as I said, you know, this book is fundamentally about friendship as a great love and a great loss that we don't always have the rituals that we have for other relationships that define us. And I know you've talked about this on your show and other interviews and I've noticed it myself that, you know, we have to sometimes make our own rituals around the great love of friendship, the specific kind of intimacy that we can form with our friends. And then again, when we lose our friends, what those rituals can look like to sort of keep hearing from the people we love and to keep their memories with us.

13:37And so one of the kind of rituals that I use to open the book is the one you're pointing to, the wind telephone. And as you said, this isn't an experience of mine. This is an experience that I initially heard about through a beautiful American life story from Mickey Meek, who tells us about a man, Itaru Sasaki, in Japan, who lost a cousin and really missed his cousin and wanted to keep talking to his cousin. So he installs this old fashioned phone booth in his garden. And he would have a ritual of opening the door to the phone booth and walking inside and picking up this heavy rotary phone and dialing the numbers and talking to his cousin.

14:19And then after that, Booth already was installed in his backyard. A great tsunami hit his town and others along the coast of Japan. And so suddenly people, you know, hundreds of people who had lost loved ones to this storm found their way to Sasaki's booth. And they came and opened the door and picked up the phone. And for one split second possibility, there was a kind of conversational practice that invited loved ones back and that allowed them to have these sort of magical, ordinary conversations. And so, you know, I opened the book with that image, because it captures so much, I think, of what I'm getting at in the book around allowing ourselves to have these kinds of conversations that give us that split second possibility of the presence of people we love.

15:12And so it was it felt really natural to move from, you know, that image to my own experiences and the experiences of the others who'd been left behind by my friends, Christine and Johnny, that had some similar qualities of allowing ourselves to have these kind of impossible, ordinary conversations that carry words on the wind was one of the expressions used around the wind telephone. own. So, you know, for example, Emily would sometimes Emily, who was Johnny's wife, a very, very close friend of mine, and they had two small children when Johnny died, he died in an instant in an accident. One of the things that Emily would do occasionally is go talk to a medium in order to have a conversation with Johnny.

15:58And, you know, it wasn't that she believed Johnny was present in the room and giving her advice on whether their child Max should get braces or not. But it was something about allowing herself to just experience that familiar kind of back and forth with this, with her loved one, with her beloved that gave her a way to carry on. And I just, I was really taken by the kind of generousness of the way she approached that. And then I, you know, what's, what's been so affecting for me is that now that the book is out in the world and I'm hearing from so many readers about similar kind of rituals or ways that they allow themselves to kind of, as you said, melt into those moments, avail themselves when we do let language sort of do the magic that it's capable of and bring us that companionship.

16:53So, you know, just one example was someone who'd lost her sister. And she told me that for the first time that week after she'd read the book, her mom called her by her sister's name. And they just let her sister's name like hang in the air. And while she said it was so sad, there was a way in which it also, she was so glad that moment had happened both for her, for her mom and for herself. And I just thought of the way that even a word, you know, has what Bakhtin would call an inner infinity, A word can carry all of its history and all of its story and can bring us back together with someone we're missing.

17:36I feel it also helps us connect to the idea that, you know, what we're attracted to in someone is this kind of invisible energy anyway. So when your love is not something we're seeing and it's not something you could put on paper. And that's why, you know, in every traditional rom-com or whatever, when she's like, well, there's the guy that's perfect on paper. And I just, she was the one that I have this feeling. And, you know, the idea that Michael Jackson's a song, can you feel it? You know, you don't feel you, there's this feeling, it's an energy, it's an invisible experience around the ways in which we have these really close kind of chords and bonds with others.

18:16And I had a few friends, I have a few friends who have chosen to, especially my friends who, I have a friend recently whose mother passed in an instant in a very tragic way. And she felt very connected to her through speaking with mediums also. And what I thought was one of the most beautiful offerings that mediums give people are these ways in which they help kind of create signals and signs that the person is there. Yeah. And so whether it's, you know, flickering lights. And so what's also been very interesting is, and you touch on this in the book is, I feel like I mean, I've been alongside of so many close friends and loss, especially in the past few years.

18:59And, you know, I think the first thing people are afraid of is the forgetting of the person and the idea that they're not a part of the everyday experience of their lives when they are so meaningful to them in that way. And so this idea that, you know, for my friend, if we'd sit at dinner and the lights would flicker, she'd say, oh, mom, mom. And in that, you know, because your mom's not going to call you on the telephone. Yeah. And there is the ways in which the it visits and you can have this. I once had a friend who was dating this very kind of a romantic singer songwriter guy. And and she said to him once, you know, like, why haven't you ever written a song for me?

19:44And he's he's like, I didn't write I don't I didn't write a song for you. I wrote songs on you like it. And he meant that the words are written on your being like and and he's like, and just like you wrote them for me. Like you, you, they're on me. Like, so this idea that these deep exchanges are on, on, on us. Wow. I love that image. Yeah. I felt that a lot in your book. There's this encouragement to wear the memories so that there's this availability for them to the person to visit. And in that, it gives that certain type of permission as does the medium with telling you, you know, that, oh, she's coming to you in butterflies.

20:26So notice when you see butterflies, because that's your mom coming. And, and I find that to be, you know, grief needs so many pathways towards daily okayness. It's abstract and it's daily and you don't get through it. You live with it. And so this book is really gives that kind of alternate artful pathway, I think too. Yeah. I so appreciate that. And, you know, another way I'm thinking about in the book that really connects to what you're describing a little giving permission to, to notice signs, you know, another way that that comes up is around in Christine's language. So the way Christine died is she died after a long illness that initially manifested in very, you know, perplexing ways where she started to behave really differently, speak very differently.

21:21And it wasn't until pretty far into her illness that it got a name and a diagnosis, which turned out to be early onset dementia. And Christine had been a poet. She'd written poetry. She loved, she read poetry. She taught poetry. She kind of lived by poetry. And I know you're a poet too. So this may, you know, may have resonated for you that far into her illness at a point when her writing had already changed so dramatically, her emails became very sort of fragmented and tons of just punctuation, strings of periods and exclamation points and question marks. And, you know, so different from the kind of the style of writing that I had been used to from her.

22:09And even within the shape of her correspondence, there was so much poetry, her own poetry remaining. But then when you talk about those little signs, the other thing that was so kind of heartening for me is I noticed in some of her writing at that very towards the end of her life, there were little kind of fossils of the poet Elizabeth Bishop, who'd been her favorite poet. And these images when she wrote about going to the ocean and dipping in her hand and feeling the ache of the cold on her wrist or licking her fingers to taste the salt, those were all images that I came to understand were part of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry.

22:51and there they were in Christine's voice, even when so much of her voice was gone. And that just told me so much about Christine, but it also tells me something that feels so vital for hopefully for readers of the book and for all of us, again, to sort of let yourself hear that poetry, let yourself connect to it, let yourself, you know, let the history of your shared intimacy come rushing in, in order to, you know, be able to keep living as, as Bakhtin said, like sort of walking a lot alongside this person as you go forward in life, you know, in all of the ways that they can be present with you.

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24:09And for our Goop listeners, mention Goop to receive up to$500 off your next meeting or event reservation rental fee. This promotion is valid for all new clients on select spaces, booked and actualized prior to December 30th, 2025, and subject to availability. Convene for the moments that move your business. I have a friend who, when you call her, the voicemail says, this voicemail will not be checked. Please send a text. Yes. And it made me want to call her after reading your book and say, you need to let people leave a voicemail. And I'd love to kind of, you know, I'd love for you to talk to us about your feelings about voicemails and the ways in which they kind of come into this book and Cord Jefferson and maybe encourage people.

25:02Yeah, my relationship to voicemails also changed. after hearing Court Jefferson's story, writing about it in the book, and then hearing Johnny's voicemails that he left for Emily's. So Court Jefferson, whom we all know now is the director of American fiction. But at the time that I heard his story about voicemail, it was some years ago. And he performed this piece that starts out as kind of a trend piece where you think he's going to be telling us about all the things that suck about voicemail. And that's certainly how he felt for a long time. and his mom in particular would leave these endless messages full of logistics and he would sort of speed through them and half listen and roll his eyes until his mother was diagnosed with cancer.

25:48And towards the end of her life, when she was in hospice, Cord realized that those messages, these voicemails that he had barely listened to were the most important possessions that he had because they contained his mother's voice. And he goes on and shares research about the power of voice to bring about feelings of love and togetherness. And I just was so taken by that idea that these voicemails can speak to us from sort of two sides of history, two sides of our connections to people, the side when they originally left the recording and then the side that remains after they're gone. And that really hit me when Emily, she and I sat down and she played, Emily, again, Johnny's wife, played for me the voicemails that she kept and saved knowing that she was going to need sort of every little leftover piece of his voice that she could have in order to have conversations for the rest of her life.

26:55and the voicemails from Johnny they all started with hey sugar so he called her sugar and so every voicemail was hey sugar like I'm getting max out of the tub or hey sugar wish I were there hey sugar just making sure you survived you know and sometimes it would have his just this riotous laugh on just the way that he spoke like hearing them I felt it in my bones and I know Emily did too and I allowed myself to believe as I was listening to those voicemails and Johnny you calling Emily Sugar again, that it was this double voicing, right? And that it was what he was doing at the time, connecting with her when he had no idea that he had so little time left.

27:35And then they continued to sort of hold a way for him to reach out and for her to hear from him and for the rest of us to hear from him. So I really then started saving every voicemail that I have from my mom. I can't say I listened to all of them, but I saved them. She is still alive, but I know she won't be forever. And so I think there is something about a kind of cherishing that hopefully this book allows people to do, whether it's to go ahead and write to somebody you love, you're missing, to when you're ready, listen to what you have, a voicemail, a video, when you're ready. And I really do want to emphasize that.

28:16I've had friends say to me who read the book, for whom grief is really fresh and raw and acute, that they're not quite ready to start playing back those things. But in reading the book, it gives them solace to know that when they are, they can like sink all the way in. Yeah. I have a friend, my friend Stevie, who she records every FaceTime and conversation she has with her dad and her grandmother. oh wow and and because her grandmother has been sick for a few years and it's very you know you know she's almost 100 and so but she there's there's just something about her where she said they are my archives and I you know and I'm you know and so and in that she really wants to create an archival of these people that like not only raised her and loved her and her mother too but also contributed so deeply to how she speaks and how she, you know, dreams and how she moves in the world and dances and thinks and befriends and all of these things.

29:25And I always love that she does that because she'll send them to me sometimes or, you know, and I think even recently she sent someone over to just video her dad telling his life story over, you know, a week's time. And it's interesting because we seem to kind of reserve the idea of a documentary or an archive for those who were, you know, deeply meaningful in pop culture or in some type of landscape of fame. And I think what's so beautiful is that, you know, we do have these phones in our hands that can do so much now. And this idea that everyone in our lives that we've loved are so worthy of, you know, being archived for our story and our kids and their kids.

30:08And I love that you took two people that, you know, it wasn't the idea of like, oh, I've always known this one famous person. So I wrote a story about, you know, you actually have really found a way to, I think, and I'd love to hear what you think about when you think about legacy and archiving those we love. because this book feels as much a, you know, it feels as though it's a tribute to them, but also a document of their legacy that it's also yours. And so I'd love to kind of, for you to talk to me about, you know, why you chose, and the two are so different too, the ways in which Johnny's so different than Christine and the ways in which they're, you know, kind of bodies left the earth is so different.

30:56And so I'd love for, you know, you to kind of give us the seed of why these two, and did you think of legacy and the idea of legacy yours and theirs as you were creating it? Yeah. Wow. You're giving me so much to think about. And I just, I, this notion of, of a kind of intimate archive, almost like a domestic archive or an archive of the everyday is so, it's like my highest aspiration for what I hope this book lets people think about. So I just thank you for kind of giving it those words. I don't know that I've ever been able to frame it exactly in those terms. And that's exactly what I'm going for and what I was sort of driven by in telling this story is in the archives of my own life.