There should be a word for books that show up in your life when you need them. Books which obliterate fears or seemingly by magic connect some of the disparate dots of a lifetime. Dots that you maybe didn’t even realize existed, let alone had an awareness that they could use an alignment, call for a needle and thread. There’s so much fixing, medicine we don’t know we need, and Julie Sedivy’s Linguaphile: A Language of Love was all of this to me.
A dear friend must have had a hunch that I needed to get over myself when he bought me a copy as a gift. Up until that moment, I’d successfully avoided anything to do with the field of linguistics for a few decades. But lucky for me he wasn’t aware of the insecurities I harboured about introductory linguistics being the only course I nearly failed in university.
At the time my floundering had felt like a real crisis, and I only scraped by thanks to a generous lab partner who was patient if somewhat mystified by my inability to grasp the material and perhaps also by my visceral disappointment in the class. What I’d bargained on was a cosy atmosphere with a bunch of words nerds who would throw themselves into fulsome discussions about the richness of language, share my love for story. I reckoned on lively chats. Easy credits. Not a greige coloured 1990s computer lab where we were instructed to assign numbers to… well, to this day, I’m not sure what to. Of course, the problem was never the class but rather my own impatience to get to what I considered the ‘good stuff.’
Part lyrical memoir, Julie Sedivy delivers on the good stuff as she stitches scientific exploration and expertise into our most basic of human experiences of identity, loss, fear and joy with the intricate and strong fiber of language. The strength of the book is in how she shares an expert and insider’s perspective and at the same time exposes her personal vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities as wide ranging as childhood identity, the loss of a marriage, a parent’s struggle with hearing loss and her own fear of aphasia. Every sentence is gorgeously crafted, and I never felt the need to arrive at the next page or chapter. For the entirety of the book, I was both on a journey and content to wait for what she had to show me next.
And the path she carves out is a deliberate one. One that in the last third, had me weeping for the wonder of our unique sensory bubbles, for our potential in the face of isolation, and the inevitable final silences that we all will face. And, with generosity, Sedivy opens herself up to her moment, laying it on the page so that after travelling the length of the book the sentiment behind the inscription at the front of her book lands with force.
For my brother Vac, the bella bionda among us: I remember you as the silver moon floating over darkened fields, leading us all home
This was a read that had me cornering my husband with passionate retellings, and dare I admit it, sharing a deep appreciation for all the good stuff Sedivy brings to us from the linguistics lab.
From the jacket cover: Julie Sedivy has taught linguistics and psychology at Brown University and the University of Calgary. She is the author of Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Land and Self and Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, as well as the coauthor of Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You. She lives in Calgary.
— Michelle Spencer lives in the ranch lands of southern Alberta which she gratefully acknowledges is the beloved territory of the Blackfoot Confederacy. Her work was longlisted for the CBC Nonfiction Prize as well as the Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award and appears in numerous literary magazines.
You can read Michelle Spencer's story "The Cure" in Issue 305 (Autumn 2025). Order the issue now:
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