"One day I told her about getting a prescription in the chemist and not being able to get my name out. The pharmacist said, 'Oh, have you forgotten your name?' The therapist suggested that next time it happened I should look the person in the eye and say, 'I’ve got a stammer.' So, I practised that, and it helped. If someone reacts badly or laughs, that’s their problem, there’s no shame. You wouldn’t laugh at someone who was limping, would you?”
In a November 2, 2024, article in The Guardian, “Maggie O’Farrell: Having a stammer was instrumental in making me a writer,” she put forth, “Having a stammer has been the single most defining experience of my life. It’s a crippling and agonising affliction, especially if you happen to be a teenager, but I’m certain it was instrumental in making me a writer. Watching words flow from your pen, unchecked, feels like a magic trick to someone who can’t rely on their verbal fluency.”
In a December 10, 2024 article in People magazine, “Maggie O’Farrell Reflects on Stammering in New Kids Book: ‘Don’t Think I Would Be a Writer Without It',” O’Farrell theorized that her stuttering led her to becoming a writer because her stuttering was prominent in guiding her to “rewrite” sentences in her head while speaking, in order to avoid letters or words that might cause her trouble. In the article she explained by saying, “I always have problems with M, which is difficult when your name is Maggie,” O’Farrell says. “You have to launch off a different sound. You are always thinking of about five or six different ways to say the same thing … I don’t think I would be a writer without it.” The act of writing itself, O’Farrell says, was also a liberating experience.
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"I still remember, as a child, watching my pen moving in these sentences and words just coming out onto the page, and it’s such bliss,” she says. “I still find that amazing, the idea that there's nothing stopping it. I can just say whatever I want, however I want to say it, and I'm not going to have any problems with it, and no one's going to judge me or laugh at me.”
Her life as a person who stutters was examined in-depth in a November 2, 2024 article in the Irish Times titled “Maggie O’Farrell on Living with a Stammer: It’s Still There, It Lurks Beneath” in which she addresses the difficulties her speech caused her in her childhood and adolescence, and how she benefited from speech therapy as an adult. She put forth, “Speech therapists talk about it as an iceberg where only the tip is available to others, but underneath the water there’s this huge, dangerous, jagged mass of ice. I still say that I have a stammer. In my teens I would never have been able to talk to you like I am now. It’s a lot better and I have had speech therapy in adulthood. But I think it’s still there, it still lurks beneath, and I worry about it."
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