Speech

Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?

—Joseph Conrad

So how badly did you stutter as a child?

Did you ever get to a point where you just wanted to throw up your hands and stop talking?

Stop writing, because language is the enemy, etc.?

And then, as you got older, of course, apparently yearn at times to stop existing?

Would you have become a writer if you didn’t stutter?

Is stuttering the best thing to happen to you?

Are stuttering and stammering different?

Is it genetic?

Did either of your parents stutter?

Or is it psychological, mental, psychosomatic, environmental? Fill me in. I have no idea.

How did your family treat your impediment?

Was it worse for you when talking to girls?

Worse with pretty girls?

Worse with adults?

Worse still with authority figures?

Do you struggle particularly with consonants or vowels?

So the “problem sounds” migrate over time?

Right—like, how many different words do Eskimos have for “snow”?

What did you think of Michael Palin in A Fish Called Wanda? In real life, his father stuttered, as you may know.

How about Billy Bibbit in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest?

Billy Budd?

Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited?

What are the other key stutter texts?

Is there a pattern, then, to how it gets portrayed?

You remind me a bit of the boy who can’t swim but who jumps into the deep end of the pool to learn how; when your novel about stuttering was published, you went out and gave readings and did interviews. How did you conquer or at least manage your fear?

There’s only the barest hint of a stutter when I listen to you now. Have you truly overcome it?

“Circumlocution”—that’s the technical term?

What do you want the rest of us to comprehend about this baffling disorder?

Humans are the only animals who use spoken language to communicate; without it, we’re the Elephant Man, aren’t we?

Writing as revenge upon stuttering—how so?

Many writers are or were stutterers: Edward Hoagland. John Updike. Elizabeth Bowen. Somerset Maugham. David Mitchell. Arnold Bennett. Lewis Carroll. Margaret Drabble. Budd Schulberg. Peter Straub. Nevil Shute. Kenneth Tynan. Machado de Assis. What do you see as the through line here?

“Aggressively minor”? Interesting.

Writing “fluently” about “disfluency”—how cathartic that must have been, I’m guessing?

You’ve written about how stutterers, in literature and in film and in life, often get away with certain rudenesses, certain violations, they wouldn’t have gotten away with if they didn’t stutter. What did you get away with?

Do you still?

Can I hear you read a little from the book?

How about the long paragraph at the end of chapter 5 about how “stutterers are the only truth-tellers; everyone else is lying”?

You doing okay over there, Mr. S.?

I’m going to press Pause, all right?

I thought that was fine, but perhaps you could read it one more time?

Don’t you think we all have our own “speech problem,” to some degree? I know I do.

Do you think anyone can really understand anyone else, and if not, what are any of us doing other than walking around trapped for eternity in our own space suits?