Maggie O'Farrell developed a stammer at the age of around 6 or 7. At first, she wasn't sure if anyone else could hear her stumbling over her words, but once the teasing started, there was no denying it:

"I can hear this repeated sound, but maybe no one else can, maybe it's just inside my head. So then unfortunately, my classmates started to take the mickey out of me, so I thought, oh ok, other people can hear me."

The award-winning author spoke to Oliver Callan about her new children's book, When the Stammer Came to Stay, a story of two sisters, Min and Bea, with very different personalities and an unbreakable bond. The book is based on Maggie’s own experience of growing up with a stammer.

Maggie describes her childhood stammer as a kind of gremlin on her shoulder:

"When I was young, I always imagined my stammer as a kind of ghoul, or a little kind of creature that sat on my shoulder and it would steal my words."

Naturally outgoing and talkative, Maggie says the stammer made her quieter and quieter, until she practically stopped speaking in school as a teenager. She tells Oliver that she was always dying to put up her hand to read aloud in English class, but the fear of stammering held her back:

"I was desperate to read Lady Macbeth or Banquo, or whatever, but I couldn't do it, because I was too worried about stammering."

Stammering has impacted all of Maggie's interactions with other people, which she says is not surprising, given that exchanging information and storytelling are part of the human condition:

"We are wired for talking and chatting and telling stories, and if you can’t do that, it affects your life in every single aspect. It's impossible to go through every day without having some sort of verbal interaction with somebody - so it makes life very fraught."

It was important to Maggie to write something which portrayed a stammerer as more than a figure of fun:

"I wanted to write something serious about having a stammer, because I feel too often in books and films and on TV, we’re invited to laugh at people with stammers. You know, it's often played for comedy."

When the Stammer Came to Stay was written to be read aloud to younger children, or for older children to read on their own. Maggie says she wrote the book leaving space for the reader’s imagination to fill in the gaps, helped along by the beautiful illistrations provided by Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini. Maggie’s own kids played their part too, she says:

"In the writing of them, I do read them to my own children. And children are very direct editors – if they don’t like it, they’ll just get up and walk away."

The Stammer, with a capital 'S’, is a character in the book, modelled on the gremlin on her shoulder she remembers from her childhood:

"It’s a bit like a kind of like a misty gargoyle that sits on Min’s shoulder, and it eats and steals her words. That’s always the way I imagined my own stammer – it's a kind of projection of it."

One of the worst things that happens to Min in The Stammer Came to Stay, is that people begin to "help" her. Maggie says this doesn’t work:

"If anyone’s listening and they have a stammerer in their life, please don’t try to finish their sentences, please don’t try to second guess what they are going to say or try and supply the words."

Maggie's stammer has faded, but she says she is still a stammerer and always will be. She thinks people shouldn’t be embarrassed to mention a stammer, and once the listener is prepared to be patient, communication is much easier:

"If somebody just acknowledges it, if they say to me, ‘I see you’ve got a stammer; please take your time.’ To me that’s always like a key turning in a lock and it’s such a relief that somebody acknowleges it and just says to you, ‘it’s not a problem, I can wait.’ And I can speak fluently after that."

Maggie says she hated her stammer for many years and hid it as best she could. A chat with a speech therapist at the age of 40 opened up a new way of thinking about it and now she is unapologetic about being a stammerer. She is also very proud of the linguistic survival skills and the verbal agility she says her stammer has gifted to her. It’s part of the reason she became a writer:

"I don’t think I would have been a writer unless I also had a stammer. If you are a stammerer as a young child, you become incredibly hyper-sensitive to language and grammar and meaning at a really young age."

Maggie also talks about the upcoming film of her novel Hamnet, starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, growing up Irish in Britain and burning a book once gifted to her by Jimmy Savile in the full interview – listen back above.

When the Stammer Came to Stay written by Maggie O'Farrell and illustrated by Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini is out now, published by Walker Books.