(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Our guest is author Maggie O'Farrell. She's best known for her 2020 novel "Hamnet." It was adapted into a movie last year, and Jessie Buckley won an Oscar for her performance as Agnes Shakespeare, William Shakespeare's wife. O'Farrell cowrote the film screenplay with its director, Chloe Zhao. Maggie O'Farrell spoke to FRESH AIR's executive producer, Sam Briger, about her new novel, "Land." Here's Sam.
SAM BRIGER, BYLINE: "Hamnet" is a fictionalized version of the story of William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes Hathaway. It's about how they meet and fall in love, marry and have children. Their young son, Hamnet, dies from the plague. The grief shakes the family and leads Shakespeare to write his play "Hamlet." O'Farrell's novel "Hamnet" won Britain's Women's Prize for Fiction.
Maggie O'Farrell has a new novel called "Land." It takes place in Ireland in the 1860s, beginning with Tomas and Liam, an Irish father and 10-year-old son, out in foul weather, mapping a peninsula as part of the British Ordnance Survey of Ireland. Tomas, somewhere between employed and indentured to British soldiers, is tasked with modernizing the maps of Ireland. Something magical happens on the peninsula that forever changes the trajectory of their family and compels Tomas to move his family from the tight quarters of their city's one-room apartment to an abandoned cottage on the peninsula and begin an agrarian life.
There are many abandoned cottages and houses and villages throughout Ireland, as the novel takes place only a decade or so after the country's Great Famine. The countryside has been emptied out, with millions lost to the famine and to emigration. Tomas is, in part, mapping the erasure of those lives from the land.
O'Farrell has written eight other novels, children's books and a memoir called "I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death" about, well, her brushes with death - nearly being murdered, nearly drowning and her childhood encephalitis that left her with various balance and spatial recognition challenges.
Maggie O'Farrell, welcome back to FRESH AIR.
MAGGIE O'FARRELL: Thank you so much for having me. It's lovely to be here.
BRIGER: So can you tell us what the spark was for your new book, "Land"?
O'FARRELL: Ooh. Well, I'd say it crept up on me very slowly. I've always really been interested in the life of my great-great-grandfather, on whom Tomas the character is based. He worked for the Ordnance Survey in Ireland in the mid-19th century just after the Great Famine had taken place. And I thought about him for years, and I thought about his son for years. His son was my great-grandfather, and he took a very different path in life initially from his father's. He became a Jesuit, which, as anyone who knows anything about Catholicism, is not a job you just happen to fall into. It's something that you really, really commit yourself to, and it takes years to train. He was a Jesuit for a while. And then he left, quite astonishingly, hence I - my existence and the existence of all my cousins and siblings. And he came full circle and became a mapper like his father.
So the two of them have always really interested me. But I could never really see a way forward to making it into a novel until I was on a train a few years ago on the way from Belfast to Dublin, and just suddenly - and I wish this happened more often, Sam. But the very first line of the book just slid into my head, which is, his father was ever a man of few words. And it was really extraordinary. I've never had this experience before. As soon as I had that first line, I could suddenly see the path of the whole novel. I could see how I could do it.
BRIGER: So, I mean, not to give too much away, but this book does really map the history of your family there.
O'FARRELL: Well, it's based on the lives of what I could find out of the lives of my great-great-grandfather and my great-grandfather, which wasn't a huge amount, to be honest. But I've woven a novel around the scant details that we have of - about them.
BRIGER: Let's talk a little bit about maps. I think it's pretty easy to just sort of look at a map and believe that it's a - you know, just a natural representation of the land. Like, oh, there's the name of this river. Here's where the country's boundaries are. But, you know, maps, as your book shows, can convey, actually, a lot of history - colonialism, violence. They can have ideologies behind them. What made you interested in that?
O'FARRELL: I've always really been fascinated in maps and the idea of mapping and the impulse to map. I think it is a real human instinct to do it. It actually - as humans, it predates our ability to write. You know, the first known map in the world is an Iron Age map on the walls of a cave in what's now the Italian Alps in a place called Bedolina. And somebody at some point was filled with the urge to draw, to scratch into the rock this exquisite rendering of their home - their fields and huts and their sort of town, I suppose you would call it. And it's just such an interesting representation of the urge to say, this is who I am. This is where I am. But of course, you fast-forward a - say, a thousand years or so and you get to the Roman Empire. And from that point on, it's impossible to disentangle the urge to map from the urge to possess, the - from colonialism.
BRIGER: And the maps that your character Tomas and Liam are working on are particularly fraught with those issues. Could you set the context of the Ordnance Survey of which these maps are a part?
O'FARRELL: Yes. So the Ordnance Survey was a - an organization, a British organization. And at this point, of course, the 19th century, Ireland was a colony of Britain. And the British decided that they needed to map Ireland in the 1820s, and it was for taxation purposes. It was for what's called the cess tax. There is still even now in Ireland an expression which means to sort of say, get lost, or, curses on you. And it's, bad cess to you, and that's where it comes from.
So initially, it was a - it was taxation purposes. And they had an edict that no Irish were to be employed, which didn't go very well. They initially thought that the - that they could map the whole of Ireland in seven years, and it actually took them almost 20. And they did have to employ Irish 'cause, obviously, you know, they would come across linguistic problems. So there was a mountain. On one side, people called it one thing. On the other side, they called it another.
Not to mention the fact that, obviously, when a British Army division arrived in a township, the Irish were naturally quite alarmed and suspicious. And I have heard accounts that when the British would spend a long time setting up their trig point, which, of course, was essential for the accurate mathematic calculations of distances, and - during the night, the Irish would just move it a few feet just to mess with them.
So they did end up having to employ Irish, one of which was my great-great-grandfather. When I realized that he'd started at - yeah - in the late 1840s, it really stopped me in my track because, of course, anyone who knows anything about Irish history realizes that those were the final years of the Great Famine. So obviously, the human and physical geography of the land was completely changed in just that short decade.
BRIGER: Right. Like, 'cause there's a village on the peninsula. Well, there's the remnants of a village. In the book, you say this. You know, there used to be 40 houses here. Now there are four. I'd like you actually to read a passage that describes that. This is Tomas thinking about the work that he has to do in light of this terrible famine.
O'FARRELL: (Reading) It is a necessary but unenviable part of his current task to distill into inked symbols and ordered lines what has taken place here since the first maps were drawn. These new revisions must contain a cartographic record of the Great Hunger, the disaster that struck this land more than a decade ago now. Tomas must amend the hundreds of households in a barony to the handful that now remain. He must erase row after row of tenant cottages on landowner estates which have been emptied and dismantled.
(Reading) The redcoats turn their eyes from this task. They prefer never to acknowledge the crisis that befell the country, the losses and deprivations it has suffered. They do not wish to make such marks upon their maps, which might lead to certain admittances. Tomas has determined, however, that his maps will bear an account of what happened - what was lost - if it kills him.
BRIGER: Thank you for reading that. What are the certain admittances that are mentioned there?
O'FARRELL: Well, the Great Famine had very complicated and numerous causes. Obviously, there was a natural element to it. The bacteria that destroyed the potato crop was all over Europe at this time. In fact, the country that suffered the second-largest losses was Belgium. They lost 50,000 people. Obviously, Ireland lost a million. Some people think that's a conservative estimate. So there's a huge disparity in that, and of course, the reason would be there are many, many complicated political, socioeconomic, colonialist reasons for why the famine was so particularly devastating in Ireland. And I'm just going to tell you one thing - the man who was appointed famine relief officer was a man called Charles Trevelyan, and he worked for the British government. He wrote in a letter that the famine was an act of God - a punishment for an idle, ungrateful people. After he wrote this - a year after he wrote this, he was given a knighthood for his services. So this is a man whose job it was to give famine relief, but his attitude to it was that it was an act of God and a punishment for people who were lazy.
BRIGER: Tomas and his wife, Seraphina - they meet as children trapped in this workhouse. What did you learn about these workhouses in your research? Were these children basically enslaved?
O'FARRELL: They were very brutal places. In order to go into one, you had to give up your land in order to get the relief of the workhouse, so to speak. And not only that, you had to basically give up your family because when you went in, you were separated - husband from - separated from wife, children were separated from parents. And I think what happened was often you were separated, and it seemed to me that there was a whole swathe of children, particularly, had - actually had no idea - if they happened to survive, which was not a given - just the idea of where they were from and where they belonged and who their people were had completely gone.
There was a story that I read about a young girl who was from Killary, and when she went into the workhouse, they made a mistake and they put down that she was from Killarney. And her father had emigrated to America, and he - the rest of the family had died, and he knew that there was one child who'd survived and he came back to find her. And he said, I've come from my daughter from Killary, and they said, we don't have anyone from Killary, and the father went back to America without her, and she was left behind. Of course, they had no way of finding him. And that just - that one tiny story just absolutely skewered me through the heart. I - it's such a tragic representation of just a tiny administrative slipup, but the disaster that it causes in these - both these people's lives. So I had to put a version of that into the novel.
BRIGER: So on the peninsula, Tomas and his son come across a copse. That's a word that I only know from "Winnie-The-Pooh" (laughter). It's not a word I come across.
(LAUGHTER)
BRIGER: It's a small bunch of trees that hadn't been mapped before, and in it there's a magical stream that Tomas drinks from. He goes missing, but when he returns, he's transformed. Like, he used to be this terse man, sort of no-nonsense man, but he returns blathering. He's wearing a crown of leaves. Fern fronds are in his pockets. He's raving about making a real map that shows how the land is and that contains all its history. And this change in his father is profoundly unsettling to Liam, and it really creates the schism between them that the novel explores. I guess it's interesting - there's a stability that obviously children rely on from their father, but that disappears, and that really shakes this boy's confidence in his father.
O'FARRELL: I've always been really fascinated by the holy wells or the sacred wells in Ireland. I mean, they are everywhere. You can find them wherever you go. Most towns or villages, there'll be at least one, I would say. And some of them have been - you know, they're ancient sort of pre-Christian, pagan places of worship that go right back to the times of the druids in Ireland. But some of them have been - or quite a lot of them have been co-opted into Catholicism and Christianity, and they've been blessed by a priest and given St. Bridget - the name St. Bridget's well or St. Patrick's well or whatever.
But they all have this kind of folkloric resonance to them, and some of them are really extraordinarily charged places. But there's also a science to them, really interestingly. There's one - a very famous one in County Cork which is said to cure madness, and recently, somebody did an analysis of it, and apparently it has a very high level of lithium, which just goes to show that...
BRIGER: Which is a treatment for psychiatric illnesses.
O'FARRELL: Yeah, which is a treatment of - even now, for some mental illness. So it just goes to show that in all myth, there is at least a seed of truth.
BRIGER: Let's take a quick break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is novelist Maggie O'Farrell. Her new book is called "Land." More after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF WES MONTGOMERY'S "4 ON 6")
BRIGER: This is FRESH AIR. If you're just joining us, we're speaking with novelist Maggie O'Farrell. Her books include "Hamnet" and her memoir, "I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death," and her newest book is called "Land."
Your father used to read to you Irish folk tales as...
O'FARRELL: Yeah.
BRIGER: ...A kid, and...
O'FARRELL: Only Irish folk tales. He would only ever read...
BRIGER: Only Irish.
O'FARRELL: ...Irish folk tales.
(LAUGHTER)
BRIGER: And I sort of see magical elements in your books. There's hag stones - these, like, special stones, magical stones. There are these magic wells. You have people who are closely tied to nature and tend to have sort of extrasensory perceptions. What did you take from those folk tales in writing your books?
O'FARRELL: Well, my father would only ever read - as I said, only ever read Irish mythology to us, and at the time, it used to annoy us a bit 'cause we used to beg him to try and read "The Moomins" or "Pippi Longstocking" to us, but he would only (laughter) ever read Irish myth. But actually, now I see that it forms - that that world and those people and the narrative rules inside these myths form part of my storytelling DNA in a way. And it was really important to me to try and transpose as much of that atmosphere of those tales to this novel.
So in Irish mythology, the land itself is - it's like a character. It has opinions. It can change the direction of its human compatriots. It can - trees can speak. It has opinions (laughter). It - you know, it's actually a person that interacts in a - or it's kind of - it's an entity that interacts with the plot, and I really wanted that to come across in the novel. And there are certain elements of the novel that are - that lean heavily on Irish myth.
There's a fish in the novel which is quite important. I did at one point come - I have a - I write in a studio at the bottom of the garden. And I did come up, and I said to my children, ah, I think there's - I think my novel's going to have a talking fish in it.
(LAUGHTER)
O'FARRELL: Which, they were quite - I mean, they're teenagers now - they were a little bit skeptical about that.
BRIGER: (Laughter).
O'FARRELL: But the - fish are very important in Irish mythology. And there's a wolfhound in the novel called Bran, and he's called after Fionn mac Cumhaill's dog.
BRIGER: You know, both "Hamnet" and "Land" are historical novels. But they're not the kind of historical novels that sort of are showy about the research that went into them. Like, there's some kind of historical novels that seem to want to be, like, patted on the head and said, like, good job. So how do you balance, like, the need to contextualize your novel within its time frame, but also sort of do all the other things that you're hoping to do within it?
O'FARRELL: It's a tricky balancing act, I think. I think in order to create a scene in a cottage in a 19th century island on the West Coast, you have to know as much as you possibly can about it. You've got to know what people are wearing. You've got to know what the floors are made of, what the windows look like, what might be on the table. Are they wearing any hats? (Laughter) You know, everything. Are there dogs? Are there - what kind of animals are outside? What's the weather like? You need to know all that in order to have the confidence to create that scene and make these people feel real and to set them talking.
But I think, anyway, in your - in the final draft on the page, you need to make sure that maybe only 2% of that research is showing. I find there's nothing that makes me put a book down faster than if somebody is trying to show me that they've done all their homework (laughter). It just kills it dead for me, anyway. It just pulls you out of it and you can't suspend your disbelief. So I'm always quite careful about that. And I tend to put a little bit of detail in. And then as I'm revising a novel, I will take it out, and take more out, and take more out.
BRIGER: You were born in Ireland. But I don't think you spent much time living there, is that right?
O'FARRELL: No, as you can probably tell by the way I speak.
BRIGER: (Laughter).
O'FARRELL: No, I left when I was really young. I was born in Derry. And then we moved to Wales when I was still quite young, and then Scotland.
BRIGER: You said that you're wary of claiming Irish heritage. So where does the idea of Ireland fit into your identity?
O'FARRELL: I wouldn't - I mean, maybe I said wary. But I think, you know, I don't really - I can't listen to myself in my very British voice saying the sentence I'm Irish, just because it just sounds grating to my ear, and probably I'm sure to other people's, too. So I think it's a strange thing. You know, I think anyone who doesn't grow up in the country they were born in or has maybe an accent at odds with their name, as I do, there's always a sense of a kind of ghost self that walks along beside you.
And you always have this awareness, I think, of, what could I have been? Who would I have been if we had stayed? And I know that I would've sounded completely different. And I might've been a different person. But I suppose I feel quite Irish and Britain. And I feel, when I'm in Ireland, I feel quite British just for the - (laughter) just the way I talk. Although, my passport is Irish and always has been. And I'm very proud of that.
BRIGER: Did you have any hesitancy about writing this very Irish novel because of any of those feelings?
O'FARRELL: I did, yes. I do. I suppose so. Yeah. I don't know. I hope nobody feels like I'm trespassing on anyone else's beliefs or - but it just felt - it was a story that just wouldn't go away. And I don't know who else would've written about my great-great-grandfather (laughter).
BRIGER: Yeah. I mean, it is based in your family history.
O'FARRELL: Yeah, I did, I mean...
BRIGER: So it does seem legitimate.
O'FARRELL: Yeah. I remember I was worried about it. I was talking to my husband, and he said, to be honest, he said, you've got more right to write this than you have about 16th century England...
BRIGER: (Laughter).
O'FARRELL: ...Or Renaissance Florence. And I thought, oh, yeah, that's true, actually. I hadn't thought of it that way.
BRIGER: So, you know, America is often called a country of immigrants. It's a lot more complicated than that, but - I don't want to get into that. But I was wondering what you think it means for Ireland to be - to have such a history of emigration, of so many people leaving. Like, how do you think that plays out in Irish identity?
O'FARRELL: I've heard it said that Ireland's biggest export is not, in fact, Guinness. It's people. And I'm sure that's true. I think it's - yeah, I mean, it's inevitable, you know? And I always think emigration is not - is usually, at the heart of it, a sad story, isn't it? And when I think about those people who left their homelands - and not just Irish people. Everywhere in the 19th century, or whatever. It was such an extraordinary thing to do. And I know some of them, it wasn't by choice, particularly in Ireland.
But, you know, it's such an extraordinary thing to leave your homeland knowing that the people you're saying goodbye to, you will, in all likelihood, never see them again. And in a lot of cases, you wouldn't be able to communicate with them again. You know, if you happen to be literate or if your family happened, or friends and family, were literate, you could potentially write to them. But that wasn't always the case. So, yeah, it beggars belief, really, that you would say goodbye to your friends and family, and that was that. You wouldn't see them again.
BRIGER: Right. Well, we need to take another short break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is novelist Maggie O'Farrell. Her new book is "Land." She's also written many other books, including "Hamnet" - and she cowrote the screenplay for the film from 2025 - and her memoir, "I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death." We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Sam Briger, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BRIGER: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Sam Briger. My guest is novelist Maggie O'Farrell, whose new book is "Land." She also has written many other novels, including "Hamnet" from 2020, which was turned into a film. She cowrote the screenplay in 2025. She also has a memoir called "I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death."
So, Maggie, your book "Hamnet" tells the story of Agnes and William Shakespeare - the family they create, the death of their son, Hamnet, at the age of 11, we think, and the grief that they suffer and the play that Shakespeare writes, "Hamlet," that comes out of that grief. As a young person, you were obsessed with the play. Is that right?
O'FARRELL: Yes. I studied it at school when I was 16, for my Scottish Highers, and I absolutely loved it. I fell for it in a big way, and it really got under my skin. I particularly loved the character of Hamlet, who felt like sort of a brother to me, in a sense. I think he appeals to a certain type of teenager.
BRIGER: Well, it's kind of emo, isn't it, the play (laughter)?
O'FARRELL: Yeah. Just teenagers who wear a lot of eye makeup, who hang about in graveyards.
BRIGER: (Laughter).
O'FARRELL: And that was definitely me at the time.
BRIGER: How did your understanding of the play change and Shakespeare change when you learned that he had a son named Hamnet - that that was a name at the time that was interchangeable with Hamlet - and that he wrote the play after the death of his son?
O'FARRELL: I was very lucky in many ways that I had a particularly brilliant English literature teacher called Mr. Henderson (ph), and he told us, as we were studying for the play when we were 16, that Shakespeare had had a son who'd been called Hamnet and that he died aged 11 and that Shakespeare had gone on, four years or so later, to write the play "Hamlet." And I was - even though I was a really long way off from being a writer and a parent, I - this really struck me. And I remember putting my finger over the L in Hamlet on my school copy and taking it off again, thinking, that's strange 'cause it's the same name. And I knew that it was hugely significant - that nobody would casually give a play and a prince and a ghost the name of his dead son.
BRIGER: I have to admit that I found the book very hard to read because I knew going in that Hamnet was going to die. And it gave me this feeling of foreboding that - I've often felt as a parent the sort of constant vigilance that, you know, something is going to go wrong, that I need to be watching out for it. And even, like, now, when my kids are in their teens and 20s, that feeling never really goes away. And I was just wondering, were you trying to create that feeling in the reader?
O'FARRELL: I think the engine behind me writing "Hamnet" was a dissatisfaction with the way Hamnet himself had been treated by scholars and biographers of Shakespeare. You know, you read these incredible works of scholarship, these huge biographies about Shakespeare, and Hamnet is lucky if he gets maybe one or two mentions. And his - they say that he was born, and then they say that he died. And his death is all too often - for me, anyway - wrapped up in statistics about Elizabethan child mortality.
BRIGER: Right, which seems to try to soften the grief that people would feel at the time.
O'FARRELL: Yes. The implication is that because it was, you know, death, that you were lucky - you know, I think it was 1 in - you had a 1-in-5 chance of reaching your fifth birthday in the 16th century in England. There was no shortage of things that could fell you, unfortunately. But the implication is that somehow it was less upsetting because you just had to get used to it, and I just never believed that. Then there was one book in particular that in - that had the sentence, it is impossible to know whether or not Shakespeare grieved when Hamnet died. And I was so furious about that, I threw it across the room 'cause I just - I don't believe that anywhere in time, anywhere in the world, it's anything less than catastrophic to lose a child. I just don't believe it.
BRIGER: I mean, which is hard to imagine, considering, like, who wrote better about grief than Shakespeare?
O'FARRELL: Well, yes. You just want to direct them and say, have you read any of the plays?
(LAUGHTER)
O'FARRELL: Have you? Have you listened to, you know, Constance in "King John" talk about her son and him dying? You know, I mean, obviously, we - I think we all know that's nonsense. You don't have to be a parent to know that's nonsense. So I think I just wanted to - and I always felt that Hamnet the boy had been relegated to a footnote in his very famous father's story. And I wanted to bring him out of the shadows and say to the people, to readers, you know, this child was important. He was loved, he was grieved, and without him, we would not have "Hamlet," and we probably wouldn't have "Twelfth Night."
BRIGER: You say that Hamnet is relegated to a footnote. Shakespeare's wife, Anne, or Agnes, I guess - the names were interchangeable as well - maybe had a slightly longer footnote but not any better. Correct?
O'FARRELL: No. Her footnotes were quite unkind, I think (laughter). Yeah. Again, scholars tended - have always tended to only tell us one story about her, one narrative, which is that she was an older peasant woman who was - who lured this boy genius into marriage. And they've - people have written things like that he hated her and he ran away to London to get away from her, he regretted their marriage, I mean, none of which there's any evidence for whatsoever.
I couldn't really understand where all this hostility towards her came from and why people are so determined, in a way, to give him a retrospective divorce. And actually, I found a lot of evidence that they did love each other instead. So I wanted to - again, to write - to ask - invite readers to forget everything they think they know about Anne Hathaway - which she's always called, I don't know why, even though her name was Shakespeare for most of her life (laughter) - and just to say, actually, maybe they did love each other. Maybe theirs was a partnership.
BRIGER: So, as I said, it was very hard for me to read "Hamnet," sort of thinking about myself as a parent. Did you have similar feelings writing it as a parent yourself?
O'FARRELL: I did find writing the scenes of Hamnet's death and his - the subsequent scene of his laying out for burial very hard to write. It's true, I did. And I didn't write them in the house where my children live. I actually wrote them in a really old shed in the garden, which has since blown down in a gale. And I had to do it in sort of 10- or 15-minute intervals. So I would write it, and then I would have a walk round the garden to kind of decompress, and then I would go in again. And the two scenes probably took me about a fortnight to write, and they were really hard. But I wanted them to be hard, actually, partly because I felt his death had been so downplayed and overlooked and wrapped in statistics. I wanted it - to give it the dignity I thought it deserved.
BRIGER: You cowrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation of "Hamnet" with the director, Chloe Zhao. I would imagine that you might have some ambivalence about seeing your book made into a movie. Like, on the one hand, it might be kind of magical, the way Agnes is entranced by her husband's play, by seeing these characters embodied and acted by, you know, very talented actors. But on the other hand, like, your work is so much about the interiority of your characters, and just by the virtue of the medium and the time constraints, whatever, like, you have to lose so much of that.
O'FARRELL: Yeah, but the book is my baby and always will be, and the film feels more like a - maybe a niece or a nephew.
(LAUGHTER)
O'FARRELL: And it never felt at any point like handing it over. A lot of people said, how was it to hand it over? And it never felt like that. It felt like more just opening it up and inviting others to step inside. Novelists are such - we're all very much a lone wolf, and I love that. Don't get me wrong. But it was such an interesting experience to collaborate with so many. Not just with Chloe on the script, but, you know, when you step on the film set, you realize that actually you're collaborating with hundreds of people. And everybody on that set is absolutely at the top of their game in whatever their speciality is, you know, whether it's lighting or rigging or costumes or set design or acting.
Or - you know, I think you can't go into the process of adaptation expecting it to be the same as your book because you will be disappointed. It could never be the same. It's a completely different medium, and the language of cinema is so much younger than the written language. So in a way, it's different. But it needed to be different, and that's a good thing. It sits alongside the novel rather than as a replica of it.
BRIGER: Your book "Land" has been optioned by the same company that made "Hamnet." Would you - I don't know if they're - they would ask you, but would you be willing to write the screenplay for that book adaptation as well?
O'FARRELL: I think I'd find it hard if I didn't.
BRIGER: (Laughter).
O'FARRELL: I don't think I would want to give it to someone else. It's such a - it's a story so close to my heart and so personal in a way 'cause it's about my family, or it's based on the lives of my family. So I think I would find it hard to hand it over.
BRIGER: Well, let's take a short break here. If you're just joining us, our guest is Maggie O'Farrell. Her new novel is "Land." More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF JAKE SHIMABURKURO'S "FIVE DOLLARS UNLEADED")
BRIGER: This is FRESH AIR. My guest is novelist Maggie O'Farrell. Her new novel is called "Land." Her 2020 novel, "Hamnet," was recently made into a film of the same name.
Maggie, you were on the show in 2017, talking about your memoir. But I just had a couple chapters I wanted to talk to you about, if that's OK - one in which you talk about your childhood encephalitis that almost killed you and left you with lifelong spatial challenges. One of the challenges that you dealt with was you were left with a stammer. You went to a speech therapist in your 30s, I think. That seems to have helped a lot. And what did you learn from the therapy?
O'FARRELL: Ooh, so much. I - so I started stammering as quite a young child. And when I was little, it manifested as the kind of classic ruh-ruh-ruh-ruh repeated syllable. And for a while, I think, as a child, I remember thinking, maybe no one else can hear this, because my family didn't react. But then it - 'cause it wasn't long until someone at school made fun of me, and I thought, oh, OK. No, they can hear it. And by the time I was a teenager, somehow it had kind of morphed into this complete blockage. So if someone asked me a question, I would almost - I think I was so - I didn't want that repeated syllable to happen, so I just kind of locked my throat. And so I did just - I would go completely silent and not be able to speak at all. And, you know, I think all stammerers have a collection of sounds that are problematic for them and them alone.
BRIGER: That trigger the stammer.
O'FARRELL: Yeah. There's a - usually a kind of problem letter or a pronunciation or a diphthong or a collection of letters that's problematic. One of mine was M, which is very tricky when your...
BRIGER: Yeah.
O'FARRELL: ...Name is Maggie.
BRIGER: Which is great.
O'FARRELL: So...
BRIGER: Yeah.
O'FARRELL: Yeah. Yeah. I know. Thanks for that. So actually, what you learn to do at a very young age is you learn about the flexibility of language. So if somebody around that time had asked me - what's your name? - because I couldn't launch off on a mm sound, I would launch off on a different sound, and I would just try to rush into it. So I would say, you can call me Maggie, and hope that I was able just to vault over the problematic mm.
You know, I don't think I would be a writer unless I was also a stammerer. It gives you a huge sensitivity to language. And I think anyone - any child who does stammer or stutter is able to come up generally with maybe seven or eight synonyms for a word almost instantaneously because you're always looking for the line of least verbal resistance. And in a conversation even now, I still am thinking several interlocutions ahead and thinking, OK. Well, if I want to avoid that sound or that word which is really hard, even now I practice and practice and practice and practice. Any kind of public reading I have to do, and I have a special reading copy of my book, which I cross out words that are problematic. And I put notes to myself, or I remind myself when I need to breathe.
BRIGER: So you don't try to avoid those words when you're writing.
O'FARRELL: No. That's one of the absolute joys of writing, honestly. So being a writer is - yeah, you're - obviously, being a stammerer and a writer helps you because you are - you can perform these. You've been performing grammatical and semantic gymnastics since you were tiny. But also, just - I cannot express, Sam, the joy of typing and watching all those words just coming out with nothing to stop them. It's - even now it gives me such a thrill.
So I decided - and actually, I was 40 when I thought, I really need to go and get some speech therapy. And what happened was that I was on a program of live radio in Britain. And someone asked me on air to read something in one of my books, and it was so terrible 'cause that was unexpected. I wasn't prepared. And there was a moment of kind of absolute dead air where I couldn't get the words out. And the presenter was looking at me, and the producers were looking at me. And honestly, even now it's...
BRIGER: That is...
O'FARRELL: I still have...
BRIGER: That's a terrible - that's making me sweat.
O'FARRELL: Oh.
BRIGER: Yeah.
O'FARRELL: Yes. Exactly.
BRIGER: Yeah.
O'FARRELL: It was horrible. And I came out of that interview - and actually, I remember thinking, I don't have to say a name. I can just say she. And then I did it, and it was OK. I got through it. But honestly, I've never quite recovered from that. And so...
BRIGER: Well, I'm sorry...
O'FARRELL: After that I feel...
BRIGER: ...To spring a reading...
O'FARRELL: (Laughter).
BRIGER: ...Upon you today. I...
O'FARRELL: No, it's fine 'cause I've got it all marked up. And I thought, OK. I really have to do something about this. So I did go to a speech therapist. And she said to me, you know, what's the worst thing? And I said, well, it's - the worst thing is if I stammer. And she said, but why? If you stammer, why is that so bad? Why is it so terrible that somebody knows? And she asked me to keep a stammering diary. And one of the weeks I went, I'd gone into a chemist to pick up a prescription, and they'd asked me my name and I couldn't get it out. And the woman behind the counter laughed and said, oh. Have you forgotten your own name? And I came out feeling so humiliated.
And I told the speech therapist about this. And I said, this was a moment in which I stammered really badly. And she said, you need to look that woman in the eye, and you say, I have a stammer. And she said, I want you to practice it now. Say it to me. And so I said, I'm sorry. I have a stammer. And she said, no, no. Don't apologize. Just put it out there. And she said, if the woman in the chemist can't cope with it, that's her problem, but you tell her. Be upfront about it.
And it was a - just a - I mean, it's such a simple piece of advice. But I think you - and, you know, as a child and as a teenager, you become so used to hiding it and so used to thinking, I need to conceal this from people because people might find out I have a stammer. And, you know, it took me until I was 41 for someone to say, it's OK. Just tell people.
BRIGER: In the book, you list the lingering effects from your encephalitis and the challenges it presents to you on a daily basis. Like, you know, it's hard to walk up and down stairs. It's hard to direct your hand to pick things up on a table. You say you're particularly challenged when there's a table set with lots of cups and knives and stuff like that.
O'FARRELL: Yeah. I hate that.
BRIGER: Yeah. And you've improved so much. Like, people thought you would never get out of a wheelchair at one point. But when you were able to, you really seemed to hide these difficulties from other people. Yeah. I think you only told one person as a young adult. What was your reason for hiding that part of you?
O'FARRELL: Well, I think - I moved from Wales to Scotland when I was about 13. And I - where I lived in Wales, everybody I was at school with knew that I had had this very serious illness and that I had been off school for a really long time - I mean, years - and that I'd returned and I'd been quite different. And I think I thought of that move as a chance to start again, so it was always very conscious. I was always conscious that everybody knew that this terrible thing had happened to me. And I knew that when I - if I moved countries and I moved to schools that I could just pass myself off as somebody who was just not very good at sport. And I thought I could do that - I could just completely start again.
So obviously when you're a teenager, the last thing you want is something to mark you out. So I just said to my mom and dad, I don't want anyone to know. I want to, you know, just be - put that behind me. And I think I thought as a teenager, I could do that - that you can put it behind you. Almost, you could wishfully undo it somehow - you could wishfully edit it out of your life. But of course, you can't do that.
BRIGER: What does it mean, though, for you to have spent so much time, like, hiding this part of yourself, only to reveal it to thousands of people in a memoir?
O'FARRELL: Well, I'd never really talked about it before, written about it. I mean, I'd written about it in fiction. I wrote about the illness, or I gave it to someone else. I gave it to a character and someone else in one of my books, called "The Distance Between Us," which I suppose was a kind of start into thinking about it or analyzing it. But I think I realized that it isn't something - you know, as you get older, I think you realize that it - you can't really leave these selves behind - that they all travel along inside you, like those matryoshka dolls. That's how I (ph) - but yeah. I think your attitude to these things changes all the time, doesn't it? The way - wherever you are on the continuum of your life, you look at things differently.
BRIGER: Do you still sort of think of yourself in that - in the way of someone who has avoided these brushes with death?
O'FARRELL: I do. It made - I feel like somebody who's incredibly fortunate that I - or did almost die when I was a child, but I didn't, you know? And I was told that I wouldn't be able to walk again, but I did. And that really feels as though I've won a thousand lotteries and - for both those reasons. So I still feel like that, and I feel that I - the life I have has been a huge bonus. And so I just feel I have to make the most of it and live it to the absolute fullest.
BRIGER: Well, Maggie O'Farrell, thank you so much for coming on today.
O'FARRELL: It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me again.
GROSS: Maggie O'Farrell spoke with FRESH AIR's executive producer Sam Briger. Her new novel is called "Land." Coming up, Maureen Corrigan reviews Mary Beard's new book, "Talking Classics." This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF TERRY SLINGBAUM'S "WATER GAMES - RAVEL RE-IMAGINED (FEAT. ELDAR DJANGIROV ET AL.") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.