Maggie O’Farrell Reflects on Stammering in New Kids Book: ‘Don’t Think I Would Be a Writer Without It’ (Exclusive)

Author Maggie O’Farrell is fascinated by the stories often pushed to the sidelines. It’s what led to the plots of many of her acclaimed novels, including Hamnet, which centers William Shakespeare’s son, and The Marriage Portrait, about Lucrezia de’Medici, the third daughter of the last Duke of Florence.

“It's not always necessarily the famous people that I'm interested in,” the author tells PEOPLE. “It's more the people who are in the shadows that there isn't much written about; people whose histories are written in water.”

O’Farrell’s latest book also highlights an overlooked topic, and one often portrayed in a negative light. When the Stammer Came to Stay, out Dec. 10, follows Min, a young girl who wakes up one morning to see that she can’t push certain words out. With the help of her sister, Bea, she learns to navigate her newfound stammer and realizes the importance of self-acceptance.

O’Farrell originally set out to write a children’s book about two sisters who learn to accept their differences, but Min’s speech impediment soon took over the story.

“It's very rare in fiction, any kind of fiction, to meet a character with a stammer who's taken seriously,” says O’Farrell, who has a stammer herself. “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,” she says. “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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Her own stammer, she says, was influential in becoming an author herself. For one, O’Farrell learned how to “rewrite” sentences in her head while speaking, in order to avoid letters or words that might be difficult for her to say.

“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.”

O’Farrell is also the author of the children’s books Where Snow Angels Go and The Boy Who Lost His Spark, which both feature illustrations by Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini. The author notes that writing for kids comes with its own challenges, just like writing for adults does. The narrative needs to be clearer, she says, but you can’t underestimate the reader, as kids are quick to offer “instant editorial feedback,” something O’Farrell learned by reading her work to her own children.

“If you are reading them something and they lose interest, they're just going to get up and walk away,” she says. With her latest book, however, one challenge was confronting such a personal topic.

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“It's a bit like looking at the sun,” O’Farrell says. “You don't want to look at it too much because you think if you look at it or think about it or dwell on it too much, that it's going to come back, it's going to get worse. So in a way, I was nervous writing about it. But it was good to. It's good to face up to these things.”

O’Farrell also credits other writers with stammers, like David Mitchell, John Updike, Margaret Drabble and Colm Toibin, for portraying the speech condition in a positive light in their work. She has her own message to share with readers of her new book, too.

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“We all have challenges in life, but some of our struggles or challenges are more visible than others,” she says. “And so, we have to treat each other with compassion and kindness because we have no idea what's going on in other people's lives.”

When the Stammer Came to Stay is now available from Walker Books US.

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