Maggie O’Farrell

And she said, you need to look that woman in the eye and you say, I have a stammer.

And she said, I want you to practice it now.

Say it to me.

And so I said, I'm sorry, I have a stammer.

And she said, no, no, don't apologize.

Just put it out there.

And she said, if the woman in the prochemist can't cope with it, that's her problem.

But you tell her, be upfront about it.

And it was, I mean, it's such a simple piece of advice.

But I think, you know, as a child and as a teenager, you become so used to hiding it and so used to thinking, I need to conceal this from people because people might find out I have a stammer.

You know, it took me until I was 41 for someone to say, it's okay, just tell people.

I'd never really talked about it before.

I mean, I'd written about it in fiction.

I wrote about that illness.

I gave it to someone else.

I gave it to a character and someone else in one of my books called The Distance Between Us, which I suppose was a kind of start into thinking about it or analysing it.

But I think I realize that it isn't something, you know, as you get older, I think you realize that you can't really leave these selves behind, that they all travel along inside you like those Matryoshka dolls.

But yeah, I think your attitude to these things changes all the time, doesn't it?

The way wherever you are on the continuum of your life, you look at things differently.

That's my pleasure.