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“As a stutterer who was always afraid of speaking but was rarely able to keep his mouth shut, I have a story to tell.”
So says Marty Jezer about his insightful and invaluable book about stuttering, that, by necessity, is also a work about speaking, silence, and the pleasures and pitfalls of everyday communication.
With eloquence, humor and passion, Jezer delves into his lifelong struggle with fluent speech. “I live on both sides of the disability dilemma, ” he says. As long as I keep silent, I look like a normal fluent person. But every time I talk I put my identity on the line. My need to speak and the probability that I will stutter are the dominant facts of my life.
This is a book about denial, fear, persistence, pluck and ultimate triumph. With poignant personal anecdotes, Jezer recalls being a student too embarrassed to speak in class yet humiliated by his own chosen silence. Afraid to phone girls, he found ingenuous ways to ask them for dates. Apprehensive about raising children, he delighted in reading to his daughter. Told at a job interview that he was unemployable, he created his own career.
In an effort to “cure” his stuttering, Jezer has tried many kinds of speech therapy and psychotherapy. He even volunteered as a guinea pig to test an experimental drug for the National Institutes of Health. Through the examples of new-found friends in the self-help movement for people who stutter, he learned to take responsibility for his speech. Although Jezer still stutters, he is no longer afraid to speak.
However unique stuttering is as a disability, the daily embarrassments and deeper psychic indignities that stutterers face are commonplace. The defeats of giving in to them and the triumphs of overcoming them are, as Jezer writes, the drama of life..
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