When Silence is a Plea Bargain

In the fifth grade, Meredith Kelly and I kindled a romance through a series of love letters condensed onto 3 by 5 index cards, which we delivered to one another through appointed emissaries. At recess, she often waited for me to come talk to her, but I never gathered up the courage to do it. I explained to her in my notes that I couldn’t speak to her because of my stutter. Meredith assured me, in handwriting that managed both neatness and warmth, that she thought my stutter was “cute.” I didn’t buy it. I was perfectly content to let our relationship exist in theory, unmarred by the messiness of physical contact and the spoken word. The relationship buckled under the weight of my silence, and Meredith moved on to Ben, a charismatic class clown.

I’d begun stuttering four years earlier, at the age of seven. I don’t remember much from the beginning of my life as a stutterer, except that my speech had suddenly become of great concern to what seemed like a growing number of people. Guidance counselors, speech therapists, and teachers alike flocked to my suddenly choked speech, forming what amounted to a team of advisers: my Stutter Cabinet.

The Cabinet’s self-appointed membership waxed confident about Winston Churchill and James Earl Jones—stuttering’s most notable successes—certain that with hard work and resilience I, too, would “overcome” my stutter. I first tried overcoming it in the office of my school’s speech therapist, where I practiced reading aloud in an elongated, droning manner that sounded something like Forrest Gump on quaaludes but allowed me to get through long passages of without stuttering. This was technically “fluency,” in the way that riding a bike with training wheels is still technically riding a bike but in the end makes you seem somehow less competent than if you’d just admitted you