Novelist Maggie O’Farrell: ‘Children don’t just need butterflies and rainbows’ | Maggie O’Farrell

It was a live radio broadcast that made Maggie O’Farrell realise she finally had to tackle her stammer. In 2010, she was just about to appear on Woman’s Hour when she was unexpectedly asked to read from her Costa prize-winning novel, The Hand That First Held Mine. “I thought, God, I don’t know if I can,” O’Farrell says when we meet in Edinburgh, where she lives with her family. Ever since childhood, O’Farrell has had a stammer. To get through readings at literary events she always sticks to a meticulously rehearsed passage, chosen to make sure it doesn’t include any verbal trip-hazards. But this time she was caught off guard.

“Jenni Murray looked at me over her half-moon spectacles and then she turned and looked at the producer through the glass,” O’Farrell recalls of her hesitation. To make matters worse, her protagonist was called Elina, which she couldn’t say. “Why the hell did I call her that?” she remembers thinking. In her panic she decided to refer to Elina as “she”. To her, the pause felt like an hour, but only her husband, novelist William Sutcliffe, listening nervously at home, noticed. She survived the interview but decided it was time to seek help. She finally started speech therapy in her late 30s.

Her latest children’s book, When the Stammer Came to Stay, is all about growing up with a speech disorder. Like her previous two publications for children, Where Snow Angels Go and The Boy Who Lost His Spark, it is gorgeously illustrated by Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini, whose Flower Fairies-style watercolours give the books a nostalgic feel.

Min and her sister Bea are opposites: one messy and chatty, the other neat and thoughtful – O’Farrell’s working title was The Tidy and Untidy Room. The two sisters are modelled on Maggie (Min) and her younger sister Bridget (Bea), with whom she shared a bedroom. The middle of three girls, O’Farrell was born in Derry, but the family moved to Wales and then Scotland when she was 12. She gave Terrazzini an old photo album from childhood, and Min is illustrated with a mop of curls. “They are a kind of mixture, they’re both of us, but also neither of us at the same time,” she explains of the characters. One morning, in the story, Min finds she just can’t get her words out properly. Like the two little bears in the AA Milne poem, the sisters are more similar than they thought. “I wanted to write about the idea that everybody lives with difficulties, some more visible than others,” O’Farrell says. “And maybe you can actually turn them to your advantage.”

We are in her favourite local cafe, rather than at her home as planned, because her husband and two of her three children have come down with Covid. “It’s a plague house,” she jokes. Of course, O’Farrell is now famous as the author of Hamnet, a breathtaking fictionalisation of the death of Shakespeare’s only son from the bubonic plague. It won the Women’s prize for fiction in 2020, has been made into a play by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and is soon to be released as a film starring Jessie Buckley alongside Paul Mescal (of Normal People fame) as Will. In short, it is huge. “God, no! Not at all,” O’Farrell replies modestly when I ask if her life has been upturned by its success, although that might be about to change when the film comes out next year.

She co-wrote the screenplay with the director Chloé Zhao. Filming only finished in September and though she turned down the chance of a cameo appearance, she loved being on set. “It was really, really fun. I’d be watching the monitor and suddenly I would hear someone say a line and think: ‘That’s weird, I wrote that.’” People – well, women, she clarifies – keep asking her if they can meet Mescal. “He’s not moving in with me!” she exclaims, laughing.

Talking to her over a cinnamon tea, you wouldn’t guess O’Farrell has a stammer. “You never quite get rid of it,” she says. “No one really understands why some people do it and why others don’t.” When she was eight she nearly died from encephalitis and spent two years off school. She was told she might never be able to walk again, and still has problems with balance and co-ordination. Although not directly related, the stammer began at around this time. More even than the illness, it is “the most defining feature of my life”, she says. “It sort of decided who I could be friends with, what kind of jobs I could do.”

As a child with a stammer you become highly attuned to grammar and meaning, she explains. “You turn into your own editor. You’re doing it all the time in the back of your mind. You think: I can’t say that, so I’m going to have to flip that clause or find a synonym.” She can instantly spot a fellow stammerer. “You can recognise the strategies and their processing and their thinking. They’ve got all those coping mechanisms.”

In his partly autobiographical novel Black Swan Green, David Mitchell, who also has a stammer, gives his 13-year-old narrator an imaginary hangman in his head who blocks words, so he has to come up with alternatives before anyone thinks he is stupid. For O’Farrell, the danger words are those beginning with L, P, B and, most unhelpfully, M. “You can call me Maggie,” she taught herself to say, or “I’ve lived in London for 10 years”, when people asked where she was based. (After going to Cambridge University, she worked as a journalist for the newly established Independent on Sunday.)

At school she would be bursting with frustration at not being able to read out loud in English classes, and teachers were often surprised at how well she did in exams, because she had been unable to speak up during lessons. She made up for it on the page: “If you can’t express yourself verbally, or you can’t rely on your spoken voice, having a written voice is like a gift,” she says. “Just watching your pen move and the words come out, it’s like magic.”

One of the ideas behind When the Stammer Came to Stay is that disabilities can also give you special powers. Unlike the DayGlo positivity of so many contemporary children’s books, O’Farrell espouses a more old-fashioned “you’ve got to play the cards you’re dealt” philosophy. She is reluctant to use the word “upside”, but one compensation for her dysfluency is “an unerring eye” for jerks. “My stammer is a divining rod for people who aren’t as kind or as nice as they might be,” she confides. If she started stuttering on a date, for example, it was an immediate red flag. It still happens if someone makes her feel uncomfortable. “There are things I’ve learned from it that made me into the person I am today,” she says. “Certainly, I don’t know if I’d be a writer, if I hadn’t also been a stammerer.”

Since her first novel, After You’d Gone, was published in 2000, O’Farrell has written nine novels and one memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am, a collection of personal essays recalling her “17 brushes with death”. She followed up on the career-defining success of Hamnet with another historical novel, The Marriage Portrait, in 2022. Set in Renaissance Italy, it tells the story of Lucrezia de’ Medici (the inspiration for Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess) who was possibly poisoned by her husband when she was only 16.

She has also turned her hand to writing children’s books, with three in the last four years. Each is dedicated to one of her three children. As lavishly illustrated as a picture book, but with the narrative complexity of a chapter book, they fill what O’Farrell saw as a gap for children between five and 10, to be read aloud or alone by early readers. Why should children stop wanting pictures as soon as they start to read?

Combining magical or supernatural creatures – angels, noukas and dibbuks – with everyday childhood worries such as being ill, moving house or having a stammer, O’Farrell’s children’s books don’t shy away from troubling material. Much classic children’s literature, The Tales of Beatrix Potter, for example, is more grim than we remember, she points out. “If you look at picture books, some of them deal with incredibly dark and challenging themes. I think children need that. They don’t just need butterflies and unicorns and rainbows. Our brains are wired to use narrative to understand things about ourselves and the world.” And she believes young readers can cope with unfamiliar language, recalling Potter’s description of “the soporific” effects of lettuce on the Flopsy Bunnies. “It’s a beautiful word, so why not give children those really beautiful words?”

O’Farrell believes metaphor is one of the best ways to explain frightening things to children. Her eldest was born with an immunology disorder that means she can have extreme allergic reactions. On one occasion, in the back of an ambulance, O’Farrell comforted her daughter, who was freezing cold (a symptom of anaphylactic shock), by telling her it was just a snow angel putting his wings around her. The snow angel took flight in the family imagination and inspired her first book for children.

Although her daughter is now 15, her condition is no less terrifying today. (One of the chapters in I Am, I Am, I Am recalls a harrowing race to A&E on holiday in rural Italy.) “In some ways it’s harder, because you can’t keep teenagers in the house,” O’Farrell says. “Living life when there are multiple things in your everyday environment that could potentially kill you is hard, and will always be hard.”

The frightening dibbuk that Min sees in the mirror in the new book is a more child-friendly version of Jewish folklore’s malicious Dybbuk (Sutcliffe is Jewish). It is another metaphor for the mortal danger running throughout O’Farrell’s fiction: “the sense that we’ve all got this scary thing on our shoulder”, she says. O’Farrell’s second book for children, The Boy Who Lost His Spark, was written alongside The Marriage Portrait during lockdown. “We all lost so much of our spark,” she says now. “We all had to try to find it again, to embrace life again.”

Despite this foray into children’s fiction, she considers herself “a novelist, first and foremost. That’s what I feel is in my DNA.” Having abandoned 20,000 words of a manuscript that she had spent a long time researching but felt “wasn’t actually a novel”, she is deep into another. “The best book you’re always going to write is the one you can’t not write,” she says. “The one that’s shouting its name.” All she will say is that it’s “turning out to be long and rather hefty”. She never tells anyone what she is writing about, even her husband. Fed up with the novelist’s habit of spending years alone with a laptop, Sutclifffe has recently qualified as a psychotherapist. He is forbidden from practising at home. In conversation the other day, he asked: “How do you feel about that?” O’Farrell tells me, appalled at the therapy speak.

The old potting shed in which she wrote Hamnet – pacing around the garden during the most traumatic scenes – blew down in a storm shortly after she finished. During lockdown she resorted to hiding in her daughter’s wendy house to write. The shed has been replaced by a smart reconstructed greenhouse with no internet connection. After years of working around small children and school hours, she has trained herself to write in short bursts, and is strict about devoting her mornings to writing. “All books are written against impossible odds,” she says. “The odds just change.”