The Sound of C: On Giving a Voice to the Words of Others

As I was preparing to record the audiobook version of my forthcoming memoir, Other People’s Words, I had some questions: What do five exclamation points in a row sound like? Four question marks? Strings and strings of periods?

My publisher, Spiegel and Grau, had booked three marathon recording sessions for me to narrate the story. When the director called the headphones I’d be using “cans,” I pictured my sister and me, attaching a long piece of yarn to two SpaghettiO containers, moving them between our ears and mouths, and swearing that we could hear the softest whisper from a separate room.

But what does it take for spoken words to reach readers in the way that you intend? This was my problem: there were whole sections of what I had written that I didn’t know how to say.

Other People’s Words is about two friends of mine, Christine and Jonnie, who died around the same time. Christine died slowly, after a long, mysterious illness. Jonnie was killed in an instant while swimming in a lake. The book explores what it feels like to lose great friends and then to find them, again and again, through language. I wrote it as a devotion to friendship and to understand how we sustain conversations with people in our lives after they are gone, by carrying their voices within our own.

Reeling from these deaths, my mind went to an unexpected place: the philosophy of a twentieth-century Russian literary critic, Mikhail Bakhtin. I’d studied Bakhtin in grad school and learned from him that “our speech is filled to overflowing with other people’s words”—a simple, radical observation that offered consolation. And so, alongside the other companions I write about in the book, I tell Bakhtin’s story, too.

Given my subject matter, and that I’d spent eight years on the book and many more studying Bakhtin, you’d think I’d be prepared to unleash the voices that people my story. Like Lorrie Moore’s character in Who Will Run the Frog Hospital, I wanted to access “the crowd in my voice box,” to “splinter my throat into harmonies.” I even had an additional advantage working for me. By profession, I’m an audio producer and editor. Sound is my medium. But narrative podcasters don’t need to carry all the voices in our stories. We get to use recorded interviews—what radio people call “actualities,” “acts” for short. It’s an apt term. Our sources’ voices go a long way to bring life to audio stories. For my book, I couldn’t rely on actualities to realize other people’s words. I’d need to utter them myself.

“What should I do about the punctuation?” I asked my friend Sharif Youssef, a sound designer.

I forwarded them a handful of DIY recordings I’d made of Christine’s correspondence that I quote in the book. Would they mind playing around with some possible sound effects?

*

For more than thirty years, Christine taught English. She wrote constantly: hand-written letters and postcards, poems, endless comments on student papers, missives to school administrators or politicians who’d pissed her off, essays she performed at assemblies, countless emails and texts. Without fail, her writing was precise, disciplined, lyrical. She broke grammatical rules on purpose, for effect, or to demonstrate an assignment for students to write in the style of The God of Small Things, where Arundhati Roy uses creative spelling (“porketmunny”) and unexpected capitalization (“brittle with exhaustion from her battle against Real Life”) to wring new meanings from ordinary words.

After a terrible breakup with Mercy, her partner of 17 years, Christine’s messages picked up in frequency, and so did her use of excess punctuation. I sensed something was off, but I thought the problem was heartbreak. Or maybe she was emailing drunk?

I went to the beach today…Too damn cold to go in!!!….so I took some strokes in the River, which was warmish….& I’m loving Edwide Danticat…have read ALL her books!!! (about memory…& family & myths…) Tomorrow I will go to the theater in town to see some shorts from the PINK film festival (gay!) I hope there won’t be Lesbian ones….I’ve written many love poems about MC….I keep hoping…she will see the errors of her ways…& come back to me….

Love,

C

Christine left notes on Mercy’s porch and under the windshield wipers of her truck, trailed her at school events. It went on like this for more than a year. And then one day, she abandoned some students on a field trip. A dean at the school became sufficiently concerned to insist that she see a doctor for testing.

He read off some numbers & had to repeat them. I did OK w/ that…..Then he read some nouns……toooooo many; & I forgot some…..I hope that doesn’t affect my ‘score.’ He’s a small man with wild hair & pants low on his hips & a frayed sweater vest…..but he was kind & gentle & said some of the tests were Really Hard….Will go next Wed. for a follow up….He did grant me a smoke break!!!! I went to Golden Egg for a grilled cheese…he said I could eat it in the Conf. Room where I had my Assessment….So that’s that…..oh dear…..

Love,

C

The Assessment results showed cognitive decline. And Christine kept writing. The marks and dots in her messages created space for different meanings to emerge around her words, despite—or maybe because of—her mind’s change.

I recorded several versions of these passages for Sharif to experiment with. I “spoke” the punctuation (“exclamationpointexclamationpoint”), numbered the marks (“and then, six periods”), described what was on the page (“capital-R Really, capital-H Hard”), even tried to convey the typography through sheer intonation (a very bad idea). Sharif returned the audio with a range of effects: a reverb filter applied to my voice at the end of Christine’s lines, flurries of keystrokes, different sounds for the various marks.

“It’s tricky,” I wrote to Sharif after listening to the mock-ups. As Christine’s language continued to change over the course of her illness (“M&I were lovers in the gorgeous city!!!!!” “What are you reading?????” “Merrry do you xx……..”) she felt, at once, far away and intimate. Her remembered voice rippled through the one that was emerging. What sound effects would capture that feeling? What version of my voice could carry it?

“I’m struck by how sounds inherit associations they can’t shed,” I wrote to Sharif about the reverb, which felt ominous, mechanical. Maybe there was dread in Christine’s words—missing Mercy, fearing what was happening in her brain—but there was also mystery, energy, poetry. “I am realizing that I might need to let that feeling emerge in the imagination of readers.”

Sharif agreed. “Maybe it will benefit most from another powerful sound design tool: silence.”

*

At the same time I was working on my own audiobook, Sharif and I were collaborating with another author, Leila Nadir, on hers. I’d met Leila at a Tin House workshop and approached her with an idea. I’d been inspired by What My Bones Know, Stephanie Foo’s memoir of living with Complex PTSD. Thirty-seven chapters into Foo’s audiobook, I gasped. For more than seven hours, I had been listening to her recite her memoir with smooth confidence, page after page. Then, suddenly, here she was, speaking in an entirely new voice: tentative, searching, determined, laden with emotion.

Before she published the memoir, Foo had recorded a series of therapy sessions that were vital to her healing. When it came time for her to make the audiobook, she mentioned to the director that she had tape of the conversations she was quoting: intimate exchanges with the therapist who changed her life. Maybe they could sneak some of it into the book? It helped that Foo is an award-winning radio producer. She knew great audio when she heard it and had a feel for how to weave sound into story.

This got me thinking. I started imagining a new literary sound, produced by nonfiction writers collaborating with creative audio makers to sound-design short excerpts from their “classic” audiobooks. I pitched the idea to Leila. She was game to try.

We chose a chapter from  her forthcoming coming-of-age story that explores the battles that raged within and beyond her family during the 1980s Cold War. “It’s a study of the geopolitics that invade our living rooms and the way that intimate violences can be felt across the planet,” Leila told Sharif and me, all of it expressed from the point of view of Leila in the fifth grade.

Initially, we were drawn to chapter four because of its televised moments: Leila, coming home from school each day and sitting beside her mom on the couch for however many hours of talk-show TV they could consume before her dad returned from work. We knew we could do a lot with clips, theme songs, and applause tracks to bring those scenes to life. But Sharif recognized a different opportunity in Leila’s story.

In the book, Leila describes a moment in her school hallway where she and her mom ran into a teacher who noticed a purple smudge on her mother’s lip. “Oh no, what if— Oh my God, it was,” Leila writes, narrating the voices in her head, the panic she felt that what the teacher saw would reveal a secret within her family. “The hallway swirled and stretched into a blustery tunnel,” she writes, “clouds storming, walls cracking—wind blew my hair…” Images filled with sound. Conflicting thoughts raced through her head: I’m okay. I’m not okay. I was relieved. I was disappointed. Leila writes through these contradictory feelings in beautiful, sequential sentences on the page. But sound has advantages over printed words. Sound overlaps. You can layer words onto words, apply effects that make voices seem close and distant. “Was I breathing?” Leila writes, in her voice as a child. Sharif found a long exhale they’d recorded from Leila’s vocal warm-ups and inserted it here. The sound of the author, releasing all her breath. The sound held her answer. “I was breathing.”

I thought of myself in the studio, recording my own audiobook. I stumbled on a line and Matt, the engineer mixing my book, had me start over at the end of one of Christine’s emails. “We’ll pick up at ‘Love, C,’” he said. Love C… Love C… Christine signed all her letters “Love, C.” The phrase shows up again and again throughout the book, a steady hold-out even as the rest of her writing fragmented. There was something about hearing Matt pronounce Christine’s words that moved me. It got me wondering about loved ones he had lost, letters he would hold onto until he was as old as me. I felt the capaciousness of language that Bakhtin taught me to listen for and understood, all over again, how words operate as “territory shared.”

There’s a scene near the end of my book where a small group of us meets up at Baker Beach to sprinkle Christine’s ashes into the sea:

Police cars started circling the area and shining their lights onto the sand. We worried that they might soon come down to the shore and catch us putting human remains into the ocean, which we’d heard was against the law. So we stopped our talking, rolled up our jeans, stepped toward the water, formed Christine’s powdery ashes into the shape of her initial, and watched the waves wash her letter away.

Reading the lines out loud in the studio, I got to the word “initial” and interrupted myself.

“Can I make a tiny change?” I asked the audiobook director.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s your book.”

“…formed Christine’s powdery ashes into the shape of her initial, C,” I said. Because the sound of “C” now had new meaning to me, new significance to this story, new resonance in my ears. I couldn’t leave our letter unsaid.

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Other People’s Words: Friendship, Loss, and the Conversations That Never End by Lissa Soep is available from Spiegel & Grau. The audiobook can be found here. You can listen to a chapter from Leila Nadir’s forthcoming book, Afghan American here.