LIFE ON DELAY

A senior editor at the Atlantic reflects on how his lifelong stutter has shaped his life and relationships.

Hendrickson began having difficulties with his speech in kindergarten, and his teacher suggested that his parents have him evaluated by a speech pathologist. Soon he began to visit the dreaded “little room,” the school therapist’s office, while he and his parents hoped that his stutter would go away naturally, as some do, but “it got worse.” Hendrickson poignantly chronicles his efforts to navigate adolescence and high school with a fear of speaking, discovering along the way that alcohol “greatly diminish[ed]” his stutter. He also writes about suffering from a depressive episode in his late teens. “Depression doesn’t care if you acknowledge its existence,” he writes. “It’s quiet. It’s patient….I’ve learned to manage it, but I still don’t know if I’ll fully return to that predepression point.” In the midsection of the narrative, the author writes about his college years and the beginning of his career as a journalist, culminating in his 2019 interview with Joe Biden, “the most famous living stutterer.” Hendrickson also describes the beginning of his relationship with his wife, Liz, who has dystonia, a neuromuscular disorder. As the author notes, the ways in which their bodies “betray” them became a point of commonality. Hendrickson’s approach to his subject is both personal and investigative, as he recounts his interviews with his family, his former teachers and therapists, fellow stutterers, and doctors who study speech disorder. One of the most interesting interview subjects is Dr. Courtney Byrd, the director of the country’s “preeminent stuttering research center,” whose “controversial” take is that “a lot of the stigma that’s related to stuttering begins in the office of the speech-language pathologist.” The dramatic tension in the book is mainly derived from Hendrickson’s fraught relationship with his brother, who bullied the author as a child, mocking his stutter mercilessly.

This appealing and perceptive memoir takes an unsentimental look at life with a speech disorder.