It was a live radio broadcast that made Maggie O’Farrell realise she finally had to tackle her stammer. In 2010, she was just about to appear on Woman’s Hour when she was unexpectedly asked to read from her Costa prize-winning novel, The Hand That First Held Mine. “I thought, God, I don’t know if I can,” O’Farrell says when we meet in Edinburgh, where she lives with her family. Ever since childhood, O’Farrell has had a stammer. To get through readings at literary events she always sticks to a meticulously rehearsed passage, chosen to make sure it doesn’t include any verbal trip-hazards. But this time she was caught off guard.
“Jenni Murray looked at me over her half-moon spectacles and then she turned and looked at the producer through the glass,” O’Farrell recalls of her hesitation. To make matters worse, her protagonist was called Elina, which she couldn’t say. “Why the hell did I call her that?” she remembers thinking. In her panic she decided to refer to Elina as “she”. To her, the pause felt like an hour, but only her husband, novelist William Sutcliffe, listening nervously at home, noticed. She survived the interview but decided it was time to seek help. She finally started speech therapy in her late 30s.
