Maggie O’Farrell, acclaimed last year for taking readers inside the Shakespeares’ Stratford family home at a time of plague in her award-winning novel Hamnet, has revealed how experience of a life-threatening childhood illness helped her writing.
O’Farrell, 48, was left with a stammer after a bout of encephalitis when she was eight years old and believes this developed her keen sense of grammar, as well as broadening her vocabulary. Finding different ways to say things became a natural skill.
“You have to be hyper-sensitive to grammar as a way to avoid your minefield sounds or words, and you are doing it on the spot in your head all the time,” said O’Farrell. “Being a stammerer has been one of the most formative things in my life. It’s hard to scratch in how horrible it can be. It is terrible at school and it alters every single option in life.”
The Cambridge English graduate, whose study of the impact of the short life of Shakespeare’s son won the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction and was named Waterstones Book of the Year, missed a year of school due to the illness and only returned to health when she was almost 11.
“Any writer who says they never use anything from real life is probably lying,” O’Farrell told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet three years after the death of his son Hamnet. O’Farrell explains the two spellings were interchangeable and believes the play about the melancholy Danish prince was partly Shakespeare’s expression of grief.
The Irish-British writer said her illness affected her both physically and mentally. Aside from the stammer, O’Farrell regards herself as “clumsy” and is unable to judge distances easily. She also claims that being close to death often changes a survivor’s attitude to life. “You are reconfigured and it’s like passing through a fire. You are essentially the same person but you have been taken apart and put back together again.
“Any brush with mortality does change you, I think. You come back from the brink a different person every time. You are always going to be a wiser and sadder person when you come back from that brink because you have stared into the abyss and you can’t ever forget that.”
The trauma did give O’Farrell a continued sense of good fortune, however. And, as she described in her 2017 memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death, her illness was followed by an extraordinary succession of lucky escapes that have shaped her personality.
“I’ve always felt my life is a sort of bonus, that I was partly living on borrowed time or I had slightly cheated the universe in a way, so I was going to live the biggest and best life I possibly could, within whatever limitation I had been given,” she said.
O’Farrell, who has three children and is married to the writer William Sutcliffe, was born in Northern Ireland but grew up in Wales and Scotland. She writes in silence but uses music to put her in the right frame of mind. Her husband is her first reader and a harsh critic, O’Farrell reveals, sometimes telling her to rewrite half a draft, particularly if she has veered too sharply towards the supernatural.
Desert Island Discs is on BBC Sounds and BBC Radio 4 on Sunday at 11am
