Later in the article she said, “I think it is the thing about my life that has most defined me, defined what I can and can’t do, what kind of job I can do, who I can be friends with…. And the thing about a stammer is, it’s unpredictable. You think you’ve got over it and it will come back. Only the other day I was in a pharmacy and I had to pick up a prescription and the woman said, ‘What’s your name?’ And I suddenly couldn’t say it. It is terribly shaming, because people make fun of it. I carried that kind of shame and embarrassment and cringing self- consciousness about it all the way through my life until I had speech therapy when I was 40.”
The Northern Ireland native expounded on her life-changing speech therapy experience in an article in the Sunday Post on November 24, 2024, “My stammer has instinct for good, and not so good, people. It tells me if things are wrong: Maggie O’Farrell on writing the book she wishes she had as a child.” She said of seeking out speech therapy as an adult, “I decided around 12 years ago that I needed to have speech therapy. I was a bit desperate. I had had it for so long and there is very little in life you can do professionally that doesn’t involve speaking. I thought it would be complicated, but it wasn’t. Within a couple of weeks, I had an appointment with a speech therapist while my tiny daughter was asleep in a buggy. The therapist was brilliant. She talked to me about my stammer and asked me to keep a stammering diary.”
When the Stammer Came to Stay was released to highly positive reviews. The story centers on two very different sisters, Bea and Min, and how one morning Min wakes up to find that she has trouble getting her words out. With the compassionate help of her sister Bea, Min learns how to navigate the choppy waters caused by her speech problem in this story of self-acceptance that will resonate with readers.
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"Watching words flow from your pen, unchecked, feels like a magic trick to someone who can’t rely on their verbal fluency."
A glowing five-star review of the children’s book in the Telegraph on November 20, 2024, ended with this high praise: “Her latest book, by contrast, has nothing to spook the horses – and the story’s mix of cozy domesticity and gentle suspense will find much wider appeal. O’Farrell acknowledges that the book turned out to be more personal than she had intended. (“Fiction sometimes has a way of playing a sleight of hand on the writer,” she concedes in an author’s note.) But the result is a touching, beautifully written story which will resonate with readers well beyond its target age group of five-plus.”
In the People article, the Londonderry native said of her new children’s book, “It's very rare in fiction, any kind of fiction, to meet a character with a stammer who's taken seriously. 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.”
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