Maggie O'Farrell talks about stammering

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Maggie O'Farrell (Courtesy of Tim Duncan via Wikimedia Commons)

The bestselling author opened up about her stammer following the release of her new book, and explained how the usual negative depictions in books made her want to write something different.

Stammering was in the news recently when the award-winning writer Maggie O'Farrell was interviewed about her new book When the Stammer Came to Stay. The children's book, which was released in November, is about a girl who starts stammering and was inspired by O'Farrell's own childhood experiences. Read more about it in our review.

In an interview with BBC Woman's Hour (which you can listen to on BBC Sounds from 11m 50s in), the acclaimed author opened up about how stammering has shaped her life:

"Having a stammer… it affects you in all kinds of different ways and it can dictate who you can and can't be friends with, it can dictate what kind of job you can do… I could never have worked in a call centre, I could never do anything that I had to initiate conversations, particularly on the telephone. 

You have to pretend it's not happening and somehow I got kind of stuck in that mindset, I think. 

(Maggie O'Farrell, BBC Woman's Hour)

'I think I had been operating, for most of my life, on the logic of my adolescence, which was that you have to hide it. You have to pretend it's not happening and somehow I got kind of stuck in that mindset, I think. 

'When I went to speech therapy when I was 40, she said: "If somebody laughs at you, look them in the eye and say: 'I have a stammer'". And that was a really revelatory thing for me because I thought, actually, if people do laugh at you when you stammer, it's not really coming from a place of cruelty, it's coming from a place of ignorance. They don't really know what's going on. I do say that to people now, and they are absolutely horrified, and they say, "Oh, I'm so sorry. Please take your time"… If you have a stammerer in your life, please, please don't ever finish our sentences, don't ever suggest a word, don't ever try to second guess what it is we're trying to say. Just please look us in the eye and say: "I see that you have a stammer, just take your time".

O'Farrell told The Guardian in this interview on their website, that "Having a stammer was instrumental in making me a writer". She explains: "Watching words flow from your pen, unchecked, feels like a magic trick to someone who can't rely on their verbal fluency".

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(Image courtesy of Walker Books)

I wanted to write something that takes a stammer seriously.

(Maggie O'Farrell, People Magazine)

After writing such bestsellers as Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, O'Farrell wanted to make a point, as she explained to U.S.-based People magazine: 

"I wanted to write something that takes a stammer seriously... It's very rare in fiction, any kind of fiction, to meet a character with a stammer who's taken seriously, who has a stammer herself… Often, it's played for laughs. We're invited as audiences or readers to laugh at this person who has a kind of verbal disfluency, or we're invited to think of them as weird or weak or nervous or anxious.

'But actually, stammerers necessarily aren't those things… I wanted to write something which takes a stammer seriously and talks about what exactly it's like and the bad things about it, but also the things that it can possibly give you.”

In summing up what she hopes people will get from When the Stammer Came to Stay, O'Farrell told Woman's Hour: 

"If this book does have something that I would like readers to take away it would be that all of us, every one of us, is struggling with something, but what we all have to do is just be kind to each other, because we don't always know what other people are going through".

When the Stammer Came to Stay by Maggie O'Farrell, published by Walker Books, is out now on hardback. Read our review.