straying from facts. So, the story I wanted to tell, was the one I lived. The reason the fiction is in it is because I had to have Mr. Spiro, who is the fictional character. I had to have him in there to pull everything together. To have a mentor to lead me, and it's a mentor I did not have at that time. I had some later, but I didn't have it then.
S: Yes, your relationship with Mr. Spiro has come up frequently in reader comments and questions. Who was that character to you? What did he embody?
V: We were up in New York, and the Random House lawyers had found out that the book was based a lot on my childhood, and so they had to vet the book. They went through with me on each of the characters, if they were alive or dead, everything. They came to Mr. Spiro, and I said, "Well, you don't have to worry about him, he's completely fictional." My editor looked across at me and she said, "I know who Mr. Spiro is," and I looked at her and I said, "What do you mean?" And she said, "Mr. Spiro is the mentor you never had, and the one you needed so badly. And plus, there's a lot of you in Mr. Spiro now." I had not thought about that, but the more I thought about it, I think the more that she was right.
S: This comment from Michelle really resonates, "As an SLP, I aspire to be a Mr. Spiro to my clients." What kind of characteristics do you feel like SLPs honoring Mr. Spiro's role in your journey would embody?
V: When I started out on this book tour, I was a little afraid that I would offend professionals. I am not an SLP, but one of the things I truly believe is that our goal (instead of some kind of a perfect fluency,) should be to find our voice. I think that Mr. Spiro would say that as long as you can say what you want to say, when you want to say it, don't concern yourself about the quality. Concern yourself about what you want to say. I think this idea that we all have to come out of this with perfect fluency, or with... I don't know, 90% fluency, 80% fluency, whatever...I just don't think that should be what the journey is about. I think it should be finding your voice, with the help of your SLP, with the help of self-therapy, with some guts, some practice, whatever you have to do. I don't think any of our journeys will be the same.
I stayed with what I considered a stuttering problem through college, well into my career. And then through organizations like Stuttering Foundation, through a lot of other things, I kind of found my path to find my voice. I can't tell you how much I stutter now. I do not know. Just because I pay attention to what I want to say, not how I'm going to say it. I do some things now which I'm sure some SLP's out there would not agree with. I still do some word substitutions. I still do gentle onsets sometimes. I'm not sure what they're called now, they're probably called something else now. I find things which let me say what I want to say. I think the SLP's who take a holistic look at this, I think that those are the ones that I applaud the most.
10
In the past few years, I've been reading an awful lot about the covert stutterer. I should have been the poster boy for covert stuttering. I tried to hide my stutter in every way I could. I would lie about it, I would skip class, I would do anything. I would pretend I was sick; I would do anything not to have to speak in class, or in some social situation. What that did is it held me back from starting on my journey of finding my voice. I just would not admit to myself that I stuttered so badly, and I had all these blocks, and I was fearful, and I would kind of change who I was. That's just not the way to go about it.
S: If you reflect back, how do you wish your family had supported you? Do you have any hindsight wishes there?
V: Yes, I do. My stutter was never talked about. It was the elephant in the room that no one talked about. I didn't want to talk about it. My parents, I don't blame them. Stuttering is very complex, it's a complex situation. I shouldn't have expected them to understand my stutter. Speech therapy at that point, it was in its early stages, it has improved immensely from then thanks to people like Jane. We have come so far.
The one thing I would say is you have to get your stutter out on the table. You have to talk about it. It's hard. It's hard, I speak to a camp for young people who stutter now and it's hard to tell a six or seven-year-old that, "This is not going to go away overnight. There is no magic pill. You have to have courage, you have to put
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