With unparalleled lyricism and a command of language only a poet could possess, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir recounts Safiya Sinclair’s life as a Rastafarian child raised under the oppressive and patriarchal rule of her father. While providing a contextual background on Rastafari—a religious movement and cultural community many have heard of, but few outsiders understand—Jamaican-born Sinclair tells the story of her and her siblings’ upbringing of isolation, fear and poverty. Shining a spotlight on the persecution and unwanted attention her unorthodox upbringing garnered in Jamaica, in addition to the acts of racism running rampant in the Western world, Sinclair describes acts of ignorance and cruelty from a perspective so close, you can feel her wounds. How to Say Babylon contemplates matters of race and religion, of class and equality, of identity and womanhood, through an unforgettable voice that’s unflinchingly raw and powerful.
The beacon of light throughout this often tragic narrative is Sinclair’s journey to her vocation as a writer. With rich descriptions that feel languid and decadent, each sentence should be consumed like a meal—filled with literary nutrition and poetic garnishes that’ll leave Sinclair’s fellow writers begging for the recipe. Inhabiting a space between poetry and prose, with the very best elements of both on display, How to Say Babylon is truly a poet’s memoir. A story of Black womanhood that grips the reader through its obvious feat of craft and its captivating storytelling, the style of Sinclair’s work is utterly unique, including phonetic dialogue that brings Jamaica’s Rastafarian world to life. How to Say Babylon also considers the power of literature and education, the strength and perseverance of familial bonds and the complex notion of identity for people of color worldwide.
Above all, the pages of How to Say Babylon should be savored like the final sip of an expensive wine—with deference, realizing that a story of this magnitude comes along all too infrequently.
Safiya Sinclair's memoir should be savored like the final sip of an expensive wine—with deference, realizing that a story of this magnitude comes along all too infrequently.
Like many little boys, Darrin Bell wanted a water gun when he was 6 years old. Unlike the white boys in his neighborhood with slick black water guns, he received a bright green one, accompanied by “The Talk” from his mom. She explained that “the world is… different for you and your brother. White people won’t see you or treat you the way they do little white boys.” It’s The Talk that parents of Black children are all too familiar with in America.
Bell is a Pulitzer Prize winner known for his editorial cartoons and for being the first Black cartoonist to have his comic strips, Candorville and Ruby Park, nationally syndicated. The Talk, Bell’s striking debut graphic memoir, utilizes wit and emotional openness to chronicle the ways in which racism has shaped his life, from a police officer terrorizing a young Bell over his green water gun to protests in 2020 over the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
Most of the book is illustrated in shades of blue, with flashbacks that come on suddenly and disjointedly—like real memories do—in yellows reminiscent of sepia photographs. Flashes of red are often used during intense moments, and one particularly philosophical page uses a purple that only appears again during the climax. Hyperrealistic pop culture items placed throughout both unsettle the illustrations and ground the reader within the timeline of Bell’s life, from the early 1980s until present day. At the end, Bell even includes some of his most iconic editorial cartoons.
This book is heavy, both emotionally and physically. The size allows Bell to use graphic conventions unlike those he’s usually confined to in a four-panel newspaper comic strip, frequently doing full-page illustrations or removing the panels all together. But during several important conversations, including The Talk between Darrin and his mother, as well as The Talk he has with his own son, Bell returns to an even grid of panels that hearken back to his old format and emphasize how important each moment is.
The deeply honest conversation Bell is able to have with his son is especially compelling when presented in contrast with a much more limited conversation about racism he had with his father, shown through a flashback. Witnessing their generational growth filled me both with empathy for Bell’s father and with hope for what Bell’s radical truth-telling can bring.
Darrin Bell’s striking debut graphic memoir utilizes wit and emotional openness to chronicle the ways in which racism has shaped his life, from a police officer terrorizing a young Bell over a green water gun to protests in 2020 over the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
At a pivotal time in her life—the COVID-19 skies are clearing, her writing career is taking off and her longtime partner is making noise about moving back to his beloved Pacific Northwest—Diana Helmuth embarks on a year spent learning to craft spells, perform rituals, celebrate neo-pagan sabbats and commune with ancestors and goddesses. “I’m a skeptic at heart,” she confesses in The Witching Year: A Memoir of Earnest Fumbling Through Modern Witchcraft. “I’m sure I’d be a great atheist, if I didn’t find atheism about as comforting as a blanket of upturned tacks.” But the thing is, she writes, “I am also really tired of God being dead.”
In that, Helmuth is likely in good company with other millennials who have watched the rug get pulled out from under them too many times and would like to feel safe, secure and empowered, thank you very much. Her account is funny, sympathetic and seemingly right on time. As she points out, many of us are seeking spiritual guidance in a time of climate change, social unrest and general uncertainty. A sturdy belief system might seem like a very liberating thing.
Her story is buttressed by rigorous inquiry; she consults all the literature she can find on Wicca, brujeria and pretty much anything that will give her a handle on the fascinating, if tangled, history behind modern witchcraft. While it doesn’t take long at all for Helmuth to have intense spiritual experiences and find herself on a path to greater self-knowledge, she remains ready with questions, always interrogating what she’s told and observed alongside what she thinks and feels. Along the way, she never stops making us laugh. If you’re witchcraft-curious in the least, do not miss this delightful, thoughtful book.
Diana Helmuth brings both skepticism and curiosity to her 12-month exploration of witchcraft in this rigorous, deeply entertaining book.
The Buddha once said, “Be a lamp unto yourself.” This nugget of wisdom, which came to mind while reading comedian Aparna Nancherla’s collection of memoir-type essays, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome, may help to provide a reflective frame for readers as they peruse its pages.
The American-born daughter of Indian immigrants, Nancherla has spent years toiling as a writer of comedy and a stand-up comic. But she has always felt fraudulent about being “a so-called comedian” and, at age 40, about having achieved a notable measure of success. Nancherla had tried to cope with her lifelong struggle with low self-worth through remedies such as medications, therapy, meditation and more, but she finally turned to writing to see if that would ease her impostor syndrome and the constant feeling that she is merely “a shadow” self (even though a therapist tells her “ ‘So what if you’re a fraud? Is that the worst thing? At least you’re getting away with it.’ ”).
Nancherla presents honest, intimate, strikingly astute and well-researched essays about her mental state and overall psychological health, but be prepared for intermittent jolts of sarcastic, dark humor that line the author’s trail of self-exploration through her impostor syndrome, or, as she says, “an identity I’ve embraced without question my entire life.” These humorous insertions sometimes have the effect of distracting the reader from the main thrust of Nancherla’s refreshingly insightful commentaries, which put her mental health in broader context through discussions of the internet and social media; the struggles of people of color and immigrants, especially, to assimilate into and be accepted within American culture and society; and the difficulties, hazards and hard-won successes of a life in stand-up comedy.
Overall, the subject of imposter syndrome, beyond a brief treatment in her first chapter (“Now That I’ve Got You Here”), ends up not being the main focus of Nancherla’s journey: It is her deep dive into her interior life that instead takes center stage. However, in her epilogue (“I Tried”), Nancherla reveals what she has learned, through the process of writing, about the nature of epiphanies and how they intersect with an acceptance of being human. Nancherla’s epilogue realization alone makes this first-time memoir a worthy read. It’s an encouragement to those of us (and our numbers are legion) who are beset or traumatized by mental health woes to never give up trying to be “a lamp unto yourself.”
After trying medications, therapy, meditation and more remedies, Nancherla finally turned to writing to see if that would ease her impostor syndrome.
“Like most of the events in my life, the thought of assembling this book came to me accidentally,” Donna Leon notes in the preface to her memoir, Wandering Through Life. Leon, the author of the long-running Guido Brunetti detective series, has perfectly captured that serendipitous nature in the personal essays that make up Wandering Through Life.
The memoir runs mostly chronologically, beginning with her childhood in New Jersey, where she lived on her grandfather’s farm. Leon is conversational and self-deprecating: “My brother and I get our almost total lack of ambition from [our mother]: she just wanted to have fun, to go through life seeing new things, learning about what interested her, going to new places. Because of this, I went through life never having a real job, never having a pension plan, never settling down in one place or at one job, but having an enormous amount of fun.” And “never settling down” is one of the memoir’s themes. The essay “Drugs, Sex, and Rock ’n’ Roll” tells the astonishing story of the years she taught English to helicopter pilot trainees in the Iranian Air Force. She arrived in Iran in 1976 knowing little of the country, and began to live an expat life (lots of tennis) with her American and British coworkers, even as the Iranian Revolution arrived. This is just one episode in a peripatetic life that includes stints in late-Maoist China and Saudi Arabia and decades in Europe, particularly Venice, Italy (where her Guido Brunetti novels are set).
These essays feel like dispatches from a different era and world order, and they’re conversational, breezy and occasionally comic rather than contemplative. Leon’s tone is like that of an older friend who has a deep well of entertaining anecdotes from her storied life, and who has also developed an array of interests, among them opera, Handel and beekeeping. The layered essay “Bees” is a standout, describing her slow journey to gardening and her fascination with bees and their threatened existence. “They pulled me into the mystery of their being,” she writes of the bees. But Guido fans be warned: other than noting how her bee research worked its way into a novel, Wandering Through Life offers little detail about her writing life—Leon may be a prolific novelist, but in this memoir, she turns her focus elsewhere.
Donna Leon may be the author of the Guido Brunetti mysteries, but in this memoir, she turns her focus to her own storied life.
In Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, Rachel Aviv examines the challenges of living with mental disorders and how those disorders can define who we are. Aviv shares personal experiences and talks to a range of individuals who deal with—and find a sense of self in—mental illness. Featuring riveting firsthand reportage, moving interviews and important research, Aviv’s compassionate, revealing narrative offers a glimpse into the secrets of the human psyche while tackling tough questions about psychiatric treatment and diagnosis.
Judith Grisel mixes memoir and reportage in Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction, a compelling investigation of drug use and the nature of dependency. Grisel, a former drug user who is now a neuroscientist, writes with honesty about her troubled past and grappling with substance abuse. She also looks at the unique psychology of the addict and provides possibilities for escaping the cycle of dependency. The role of genetics in addiction and the brain’s response to drugs are but a few of the book’s rich discussion topics.
In Mind on Fire: A Memoir of Madness and Recovery, Arnold Thomas Fanning offers a powerful, intimate account of a life spent wrestling with depression and bipolar disorder. Fanning’s first encounters with mental illness took place during his teenage years and left him ill-equipped to navigate daily routines. After spending time in an institution and living on the streets of London, Fanning found help in medication and therapy and achieved success as a playwright. In this poignant chronicle of living with illness, he shows that healing is possible.
Max Fisher considers the ways in which Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and other social media platforms have impacted our daily lives in The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World. Bolstered by in-depth research and interviews, Fisher’s fascinating book traces the evolution of social media, the rise of sensational content and the strategies employed by popular platforms to attract users and make profits. Themes like communication, self-esteem and the human need for connection will get book groups talking.
From neuroscience to psychology, these nonfiction titles explore the mysteries of the human mind.
In her earliest days of practicing witchcraft, Diana Helmuth gathered a number of recommended supplies—a special dagger called an athame, many candles, a pentacle. She also carried with her a number of expectations. For starters, she would trace the historical origins of modern witchcraft; this would ground her practice in a knowledge of its roots. She expected to find it structured like many organized religions: a set of rules and doctrines, a built-in community and moral framework—and the security of knowing what happens when you die.
But the practice had its own plans for Helmuth. “Witchcraft was quickly revealed to me to not be that kind of path,” she tells BookPage.
In The Witching Year: A Memoir of Earnest Fumbling Through Modern Witchcraft, Helmuth tells the story of dedicating 12 months to learning everything she could about what one fellow witch calls “the crooked path.” Living with her partner and two cats in an apartment in Oakland, California, Helmuth performs solo spellwork at a cardboard-box altar in her office nook (naturally, the cats are intrigued) and participates in Wheel of the Year rituals in the company of fellow witches. She journeys to Stonehenge in search of a connection with her ancestors, and spends a week at a camp for witches in the woods. Her research takes her deep into the tangled beginnings of Wicca, which emerged around the 1940s and was more or less an attempt to package witchcraft into something resembling that familiar box of midcentury Western religion. (Scott Cunningham’s Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner remains a widely respected text for aspiring witches.)
“Experiencing the sensation (while sober!) that we are all made from the same star stuff . . . is perhaps the greatest way this year changed me.”
Throughout the year, Helmuth consults a number of witches who also happen to be some of her closest and oldest friends. (Her friend Lauren, a key mentor in the book, nudged Helmuth toward this project in the first place.) Now living on the Washington coast, Helmuth acknowledges that at one point she counted among her friends and acquaintances more witches than people of any other belief system aside from atheism. She attributes this to her northern California upbringing. “That’s where all the hippie buses broke down. And that’s where we came out of the yurt and said, ‘We’re bringing goddess culture back.’ ”
Helmuth has an easy wit—her first book, a beginner’s guide to backpacking, is cheekily titled How to Suffer Outside and is full of both practical advice and hilarious commentary. In a way, the same can be said of The Witching Year. Her wry perspective keeps the narrative deeply entertaining. But it’s also an endeavor with ample heart, rigorous inquiry and an extensive bibliography. Comedic tendencies never eclipse Helmuth’s genuine curiosity about, and respect for, her subject matter.
“I didn’t want to punch down,” she says, “despite the fact that I knew I had massive internal skepticism.” When she forced herself to look closely at the impulse to crack jokes, her personal journey really took off: “Deeply interrogating this urgent need to make fun of something is, occasionally, where the book deviated from a comedy into something far more serious, and I think richer,” she reflects.
Helmuth ultimately found that modern witchcraft in America is largely self-directed and not confined to any set of top-down, codified methods. This could, she admits, feel challenging at times. She found that the practice was “more about the discovery and healing and nourishment of the sacred self. So effectively, it’s therapy. And that work is hard and never done.” She adds, “I don’t actually think it’s particularly enjoyable work.”
The Witching Year contains candid chronicling of the challenging emotional endeavors her practice requires. “There are several parts in the book [when] I was like, ‘I want to get off the ride,’ and I couldn’t,” she says. Ultimately, the year included “really profound moments that absolutely changed my life in good ways and bad ways.” In the book she discusses the delight of feeling deeply interconnected with others: “Experiencing the sensation (while sober!) that we are all made from the same star stuff . . . is perhaps the greatest way this year changed me,” she writes. About communing with the goddess Isis, she reflects, “I had no idea this level of joy was this accessible to me on my own. In Witchcraft, people talk about shadow work, justice, self-help. . . . Rarely do I hear anyone talk about bliss.”
And as a defender of wild spaces and a staunch environmentalist (which many, but not all, witches are), Helmuth gains perspective—but again, maybe not what she expected. To her surprise, the spirituality she’d always sought in the backcountry could be accessed closer to home. “I realized I didn’t have to hike 20 miles into the wilderness to have a deep connection with nature,” she says. “I can go down to the oleander under the freeway overpass and stare at it for 60 seconds and meditate on its perfection.”
Now for the big question: After a year’s journey, does she call herself a witch? Not exactly, she concedes, partly because the term is so loaded. How one answers largely depends on who’s asking. She would like to see modern witchcraft cast as less rebellious and more friendly to the mainstream. The enormous number of books about magic and witchcraft in the marketplace, I point out, suggest that this might be happening. “I do ultimately think it’s a good thing,” she says, “because it’s about self-empowerment. And the more people who are self-empowered, the less miserable they’ll be. And isn’t that just a nicer planet to live on?”
Photo of Diana Helmuth by Rob King
The Witching Year is funny, sympathetic and right on time.
John Hendrickson’s Life on Delay: Making Peace With a Stutter is the kind of memoir that educates, endears, impacts and devastates, often simultaneously. A journalist and senior editor at The Atlantic, Hendrickson is best known for his 2019 interview with then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. The resulting piece had little to do with politics. Rather, Hendrickson’s article centered on Biden’s lifelong stutter and its influence on everything from his childhood to public speaking. The perceptible beating heart of the piece is Hendrickson himself, who tackled the subject of Biden’s stutter in a way only someone on the inside could. Hendrickson also speaks with a stutter, one that he deems severe. Life on Delay picks up after Hendrickson’s article went viral, when he was left to tackle media attention focused on the disability he had spent most of his life trying not to think about.
Although the book is predominantly a memoir, covering everything from adolescent bullying to teenage angst, it also includes a wide selection of interviews with other people who stutter. These conversations highlight Hendrickson’s journey from reluctant stuttering icon to a person at peace with himself and his stutter. His writing is unflinching as he depicts the daily life of someone with a disability only 1% of the U.S. population has. Personal yet informative, Life on Delay delves into the internal poeticism of someone who feels perpetually on the fringe while offering tangible advice regarding what to say or not say to someone with a stutter. By combining his own personal narrative with others’ life stories, Hendrickson provides a kaleidoscopic portrait of stutterers’ lived experiences, including creating music and art, facing childhood trauma, having their own “coming out” experiences and accepting disability as a part of their identity.
Life on Delay is not a disability memoir that focuses on trying to find a cure for stuttering, nor does it fall into the category of sentimental, inspirational stories of overcoming impossible odds. Instead, the book promotes a simple message: Obtaining true peace comes from accepting every part of yourself, including the things that bring you shame. It’s a universal message from a voice that has been misunderstood at best, demeaned and diminished at worst, making its impact on the reader all the more profound.
John Hendrickson’s Life on Delay: Making Peace With a Stutter is a memoir that educates, endears, impacts and devastates, often simultaneously.
The word windfall conjures images of unanticipated abundance: sweet apples fallen from the tree, ripe for the taking; money unexpectedly found in a coat pocket; or a surprise inheritance of wealth. Erika Bolstad, journalist and former investigative reporter for Climatewire, offers these kinds of unexpected riches in Windfall, a personal family story wrapped in a history of mineral rights, the oil and gas industry, the hard realities for women homesteading in the early 20th century and the American myths of exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny.
This heartfelt, meticulously researched memoir hinges on the author’s great-grandmother Anna Josephine Sletvold, a daughter of Norwegian immigrants who set up a homestead in North Dakota in the early 1900s. In 1907, according to family lore, Anna disappeared.
More than 100 years later, Bolstad’s mother received a surprise $2,400 check from an oil company—a payment for leasing the mineral rights beneath the surface of the lands where Anna’s homestead once was, at the edge of North Dakota’s profitable Bakken oil fields. She was jubilant. “We could be rich” had been whispered throughout their family history, starting in the early 1950s when North Dakota began its quest for oil, and when Bolstad’s grandparents entered into a lease agreement for royalties on mineral rights.
A short time later, Bolstad’s mother died, leaving behind a mystery that sparked the author’s investigative bent: What exactly had happened to Anna? And was the possibility of riches from oil-related wealth a reality or a chimera? Bolstad writes that this mystery “was my inheritance, my windfall. My story to tell.”
Into the personal fabric of this memoir, in which Bolstad recounts her search for how Anna was “lost,” the author weaves a robust history of the Homestead Act; the rise and fall of the North Dakota oil fields; the often nefarious practices companies employed to make huge profits at the expense of lands, workers and the public; and the political, economic and environmental implications of America’s never-ending quest for energy—and wealth.
With so much urgent concern over climate change and the impacts—environmental, political, economic and social—we humans have on our planet, Windfall is a timely, insightful and important read.
Erika Bolstad’s heartfelt memoir is also a robust discussion of the environmental implications of America’s never-ending quest for energy—and wealth.
Jami Attenberg (All This Could Be Yours) looks back on her years as a roaming artist in I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home. Attenberg has lived an uncompromising life as a writer, and she muses about her choices in this forthright memoir. Frequently crossing the country to promote her books, Attenberg is most at home when she’s on the move. The nature of the creative process and the human need for connection are among the book’s many rich discussion topics.
In I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death, Maggie O’Farrell (Hamnet) recalls the harrowing moments that have shaped her as a woman and mother. From an illness that almost claimed her life as a child to a dangerous dive off a cliff in Scotland, O’Farrell details her many near-death experiences. Over the course of 17 chapters, she considers life’s impermanence and the ways in which our bodies betray us. The result is an extraordinary narrative full of poetry and courage.
Akwaeke Emezi (The Death of Vivek Oji) delivers a compelling account of their artistic growth and search for identity in Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir. Comprised of letters the author writes to friends and colleagues, the narrative is a captivating chronicle of personal transformation. Emezi, who hails from Nigeria, put down roots in New Orleans and has experienced literary success, even as they continued to seek a more authentic existence. Uncertainty and longing animate their correspondence, and Emezi uses the epistolary form to great effect as they question long-held notions of identity, gender and family.
Jesmyn Ward (Sing, Unburied, Sing) reflects on the costs of structural racism in Men We Reaped: A Memoir. The death of her brother and a number of male friends inspired Ward to explore mortality and how loss impacts the living. In this searing memoir, she remembers her Mississippi upbringing and the ways in which economic inequality, drugs and societal stressors create an environment in which Black men are needlessly sacrificed. Ward writes with sensitivity about mourning and moving forward, and themes of race, grief and gender will inspire meaningful dialogue among readers.
These revealing memoirs are perfect to read with your book club.
“Having your child die is so brutally humbling I struggle to describe it,” writes comedian and “Catastrophe” actor Rob Delaney. And yet he does manage to describe it, and does it well, in his unspeakably admirable memoir A Heart That Works. The comedian’s first book was memorably titled Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage. This second, decidedly different, book describes the life of his 2-year-old son, Henry, who died from a brain tumor in 2018.
Life seemed practically perfect for Delaney and his beloved wife, Leah, with their “beautiful little clump of boys”—three under the age of 5. However, Henry became ill at 11 months from an apple-size tumor right next to his brainstem. Instantly, their lives were thrust into another dimension as Henry faced surgery, chemo and 14 months of hospitalization, only for his cancer to eventually return without any safe options for treatment. Delaney recounts the ordeal in searingly honest terms, conveying the intricate cobweb of emotions he experienced, often simultaneously: grief, rage, gratitude, grace and, most of all, love for Henry, their family and the many people who supported them during this time.
“It often felt like we were falling down a flight of stairs in slow motion,” Delaney writes, “with each successive piece of bad news.” Still, they were able to savor sweet moments with Henry and his brothers, even in the face of an additional family tragedy: Delaney’s brother-in-law died by suicide during Henry’s hospitalization. This unexpected death struck hard, especially since Delaney has wrestled with suicidal ideation himself, and since he wasn’t able to reach out as he normally would have because his son had been so ill.
Despite this tsunami of tragedies, there is humor, often black humor, throughout Delaney’s account. “If you can’t have fun dressed as a family of skeletons in a pediatric cancer ward,” he writes, “I don’t know what to tell you.” There are parcels of advice amid his frank, razor-sharp writing as well. Delaney digs deep on every page, baring his soul and sharing a remarkable range of emotions while relating the worst moments of his life. His is truly a heart that works.
Comedian Rob Delaney digs deep in his second memoir, baring his soul and sharing a remarkable range of emotions while relating the life and death of his son.
John Hendrickson begins his memoir, Life on Delay: Making Peace With a Stutter, at the point when most people first encountered his byline: during an interview in 2019 with then-presidential candidate Joe Biden for The Atlantic, where Hendrickson is a senior editor. Although he is a person 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 phone from his home in New York City.
At the time of our conversation, near the end of 2022, Biden is almost halfway through his first presidential term. Hendrickson, meanwhile, has spent the intervening years writing a memoir about stuttering and his journey of self-acceptance, prompted by his highly 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.”
Like Biden and Hendrickson during their interview, Hendrickson and I share a common experience: We stutter. We spend the first few minutes of our phone call exchanging mutual relief that there’s no pressure to hide our stutter during introductions, and no apprehension about how the person on the other end might react to the repetitions, prolongations, blocks or other auditory elements of our stutters. That sense of camaraderie is one Hendrickson highlights in his book as well, which not only covers his firsthand experience with stuttering but also incorporates interviews with stutterers from diverse 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 other perspectives include a guitarist named Lyle who sells self-referential T-shirts about his stutter; a nurse practitioner named Roisin who became the co-leader of a stuttering support group, where she eventually met her spouse, Stavros, who also 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 name, Jerome, with a preferred spelling of “JJJJJerome,” further cementing the connection between his identity and his speech.
“The underlying message of the book is: Never underestimate your capacity for change.”
Alongside these compelling conversations, Hendrickson provides the most up-to-date medical and scientific research on stuttering. He describes therapy practices that emphasize self-acceptance over more traditional techniques, like fluency shaping, that approach stuttering as a problem to be solved or eliminated. “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 interesting sense of disconnection when writing about a stutter, which can be physically transcribed on the page—by repeating certain letters or sounds, or using ellipses and white space on the page to mimic blocks and pauses—but can’t be fully realized until it’s spoken out loud. Even so, there are scenes in Life on Delay that capture the strain, pressure and anxiety of daily interactions as a person 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 first half of the book, there’s a sense of melancholy, isolation and anger toward his speech that Hendrickson captures beautifully: “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 part of his motivation for writing Life on Delay, for addressing those feelings of shame 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 reflects on his own childhood, interacts with more people who stutter and conducts interviews that foster open and authentic communication over the course of Life on Delay, a sense of acceptance for his own 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 experienced was a result of finally accepting his speech and regarding it as a fact of his lived experience, rather than an obstacle to be altered or avoided. “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.
The author of Life on Delay stopped regarding his stutter as an obstacle and started viewing it as a fact.
In Have I Told You This Already?Stories I Don’t Want to Forget to Remember (4.5 hours), Lauren Graham, the beloved actor and bestselling author of Talking as Fast as I Can, offers conversational, witty essays about everything from changing trends in undergarments to the process of coming to terms with aging, from adventures in pandemic cooking to the ways in which adopting an ailing dog can resurrect old anxieties. Graham also provides some behind-the-scenes glimpses of Hollywood, all delivered with the same down-to-earth, self-deprecating humor that makes her so endearing. Longtime fans will likely feel a little “Gilmore Girls” nostalgia while listening to her deliver these frank, honest anecdotes.
Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
