“We have too many voices inside our heads. You have to pick out the ones that mean something to you. What story do you want to tell?”
Because I was revising this book while simultaneously taking classes for my PhD program, my research occasionally influenced moments in You've Reached Sam. I was reading some Bakhtin at the time, specifically "The Diological Imagination." He stresses that our voice never exists in isolation of other voices, meaning we carry forward ideas and beliefs from previous conversations, and always speak in response to our percecption of others whom we are in diologue with. Essentially, everything is in coversation with others, even in our own heads.
I like to imagine we sometimes get lost in these social contexts, as we worry about the audiences we are speaking to and what they will think. I think that's where a lot of our anxieties come from, including with Julie. As Bakhtin says, individuality "lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes 'one's own' only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he approporiates the word."
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