John Hendrickson begins his memoir, Life on Delay: Making Peace With a Stutter, on the level when most individuals first encountered his byline: throughout an interview in 2019 with then-presidential candidate Joe Biden for The Atlantic, the place Hendrickson is a senior editor. Although he’s an individual who stutters, the viral article, titled “What Joe Biden Can’t Bring Himself to Say,” was Hendrickson’s first piece about stuttering that was written for “public consumption,” he tells me by telephone from his dwelling in New York City.
At the time of our dialog, close to the top of 2022, Biden is nearly midway via his first presidential time period. Hendrickson, in the meantime, has spent the intervening years writing a memoir about stuttering and his journey of self-acceptance, prompted by his extremely acclaimed article on Biden’s lifelong stutter. “Writing the article was the first time I had really reckoned with the layers of being a person who stutters,” he says. “[Stuttering] goes well beyond difficulty in saying words. It’s about avoidance and coping. It’s about trying to find self-confidence. It’s about stigmatization. There are so many layers to it that are deeper and more complicated than the mechanics of saying words, and that was the first time I had ever addressed any of that in a meaningful way.”
Read our starred evaluate of ‘Life on Delay’ by John Hendrickson.
Like Biden and Hendrickson throughout their interview, Hendrickson and I share a standard expertise: We stutter. We spend the primary jiffy of our telephone name exchanging mutual reduction that there’s no strain to cover our stutter throughout introductions, and no apprehension about how the individual on the opposite finish would possibly react to the repetitions, prolongations, blocks or different auditory parts of our stutters. That sense of camaraderie is one Hendrickson highlights in his ebook as nicely, which not solely covers his firsthand expertise with stuttering but additionally incorporates interviews with stutterers from numerous backgrounds. “My personal story is mine, and it contains certain elements that are universal. But there are so many other people, so many other stories and other perspectives out there that are very different from the life that I’ve lived, even if we’ve both lived with a stutter,” Hendrickson explains. “Those different perspectives really broadened my understanding. I can only convey my own way of living, but that wouldn’t be a full enough picture. I wanted to make sure I was offering the reader a true variety of perspectives on navigating this disorder.”
Those different views embody a guitarist named Lyle who sells self-referential T-shirts about his stutter; a nurse practitioner named Roisin who grew to become the co-leader of a stuttering help group, the place she finally met her partner, Stavros, who additionally stutters; and a “multitalented artist” who has “reclaimed the power of his stutter like no one I’ve ever met,” Hendrickson writes, by rendering his first identify, Jerome, with a most popular spelling of “JJJJJerome,” additional cementing the connection between his id and his speech.
“The underlying message of the book is: Never underestimate your capacity for change.”
Alongside these compelling conversations, Hendrickson offers probably the most up-to-date medical and scientific analysis on stuttering. He describes remedy practices that emphasize self-acceptance over extra conventional methods, like fluency shaping, that method stuttering as an issue to be solved or eradicated. “It was very important to me to highlight the most cutting-edge, modern and progressive approaches to therapy, in which they’re giving clients the primary message of: ‘Communicate confidently,’” Hendrickson says. “‘It’s OK to stutter, and we want to work with you to make you feel empowered to speak in any situation. If you’re disfluent or fluent, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re talking at all. What matters is that you’re living a full life with your stutter.’”
There’s an attention-grabbing sense of disconnection when writing a few stutter, which might be bodily transcribed on the web page—by repeating sure letters or sounds, or utilizing ellipses and white area on the web page to imitate blocks and pauses—however can’t be totally realized till it’s spoken out loud. Even so, there are scenes in Life on Delay that seize the pressure, strain and anxiousness of each day interactions as an individual who stutters. “This is the tension that stutterers live with: Is it better for me to speak and potentially embarrass myself or to shut down and say nothing at all?” Hendrickson writes in an early chapter. “Neither approach yields happiness.” In the primary half of the ebook, there’s a way of melancholy, isolation and anger towards his speech that Hendrickson captures superbly: “I understand that my stutter may make you cringe, laugh, recoil. I know my stutter can feel like a waste of time—of yours, of mine—and that it has the power to embarrass both of us. And I’ve begun to realize that the only way to understand its power is to talk about it.” Hendrickson shares that half of his motivation for writing Life on Delay, for addressing these emotions of disgrace and isolation head-on, was to “write a book that my teenage self wanted to read.”
“It’s harder and it takes longer to reach a place of acceptance—to really undergo this change in perspective and make peace with the fact that things aren’t perfect.”
As Hendrickson displays on his personal childhood, interacts with extra individuals who stutter and conducts interviews that foster open and genuine communication over the course of Life on Delay, a way of acceptance for his personal speech begins to emerge. “I’ve changed,” Hendrickson says succinctly. “I’ve undergone a change with my relationship to my stutter. Five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I would have never expected to be writing a book about stuttering, or giving interviews, or doing anything remotely resembling public speaking. So the underlying message of the book is: Never underestimate your capacity for change.”
Hendrickson says the change he skilled was a end result of lastly accepting his speech and concerning it as a truth of his lived expertise, quite than an impediment to be altered or averted. “The subtitle of the book is ‘Making Peace With a Stutter’ because that was really my goal. It’s possible to reach a place of peace with it, and that is a really profound feeling, because it’s different from liking something or hating something,” he says. “There are so many things in our lives we likely wish were different or, if we had a do-over, that we would change. It’s harder and it takes longer to reach a place of acceptance—to really undergo this change in perspective and make peace with the fact that things aren’t perfect. When you’re able to internalize a message like that and apply it to other parts of life, it does give you a sense of peace.”
Author headshot of John Hendrickson by Matthew Bernucca.
Discussion about this post