Author Maggie O’Farrell: I had a teacher at school who took the register, called my name and said to me, ‘Are your family in the IRA?’ (2024)

When you leave a place, in my case Ireland, you live with the ghost of who you might have become. Who would I be now if my family had stayed? I might have been a different person. I feel as a family we lost quite a lot moving [from Derry] to Britain but that’s just life isn’t it? You carry on.

My dad, who is from Dublin, was teaching economics in Derry when I born in 1972. It was only a few months after Bloody Sunday, so when he was offered a job with the University of Wales, I think he took it to get us out of the situation. My parents never thought we’d completely up sticks to Britain forever, but that’s the way it turned out. We eventually settled in Scotland.

My mum is Irish too, but my dad is one of those Irish immigrants who never really got over it. My dad is the one who looks back all the time. Leinster winning the rugby is a personal reflection on him. Growing up, he’d only ever read myself and my two sisters Irish myths as bedtime stories. As a result, those stories are a kind of narrative bedrock for me. We spent all of our childhood summers in Ireland – in Dublin and Galway and Donegal. I always wished I had an accent like my cousins. In Britain I felt Irish, and in Ireland I felt British. I still come back to Ireland a lot. I think about moving back sometimes too and I cling to my Irish passport more tightly since Brexit.

Being Irish in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s wasn’t easy. I mean, I had a teacher at school who took the register, called my name and then said to me, “Are your family in the IRA?”, When I had my first job in a newspaper someone took a phone call from my father and said to me “Oh your dad called, I really thought he was ringing to tell us we had a five-minute warning”. They thought it was funny.

My new children’s book When The Stammer Came to Stay started out as a story about two very different sisters sharing a room, but developed into a book about having a stammer that also explores the challenges we all live with. I always tell my children that everyone is struggling with something – it’s just that for some people the struggle is more visible.

I was about seven when I first became conscious that I was stammering. In my child-brain I thought maybe nobody else noticed. Then of course the kids at school started imitating me, and I thought, “No it’s not just inside my head”.

It was painful starting in a new school as a teenager in Scotland. English was one of my favourite subjects and I couldn’t get my words out to read in class. Pronouncing the letter M was hard, which is tricky when your name is Maggie and you want to read Macbeth out loud in class. I never got any speech therapy as a child, you just got on with it. Much later, I had to talk about one of my books on live radio, my worst nightmare, and I shut down in the middle of talking to Jenni Murray on BBC Radio 4′s Woman’s Hour. I did manage to get past it, but I realised I couldn’t go on like that any more so I got some therapy.

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The therapist asked me to keep a stammering diary. One day I told her about getting a prescription in the chemist and not being able to get my name out. The pharmacist said “Oh, have you forgotten your name?” The therapist suggested that next time it happened I should look the person in the eye and say “I’ve got a stammer”. So I practised that, and it helped. If someone reacts badly or laughs, that’s their problem, there’s no shame. You wouldn’t laugh at someone who was limping, would you?

I’m not allowed to say much about the upcoming movie adaptation of my novel Hamnet, but I can say it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Jessie Buckley, who plays Shakespeare’s wife Agnes, and Paul Mescal, who plays Shakespeare, were extraordinary in those roles. I mean, how could they not be? I had seen Paul years ago in Dublin when he played Stephen Dedalus in a theatrical adaptation of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man.

I actually didn’t feature Irish people in my books until my fourth novel, Instructions For A Heatwave. I think I didn’t want to trade off it or jump on a bandwagon. I remember years ago, at a writing festival in Australia, I was put on a panel about Irish writing. I told the organisers I didn’t feel comfortable, sitting there with my English accent – I’d feel a fraud. They told me, “but you’re the most Irish person we have”. The other panellists had one Irish great-grandparent or something. It’s strange, because Irish-American is a very common expression – but there isn’t one for the Irish in Britain. We don’t say Irish-British or the equivalent, which is peculiar when you think of how many Irish came over here and stayed. It’s a strange linguistic gap.

In conversation with Róisín Ingle. This interview, part of a series, was edited for clarity and length. When the Stammer Came to Stay by Maggie O’Farrell is out now

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