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- [00:00]
Maggie O'Farrell
This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel, that's your drive. For more Capella University's Flexpath learning format
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Mary Beard
lets you earn your degree at your
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Maggie O'Farrell
pace without putting life on pause.
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Terry Gross
Learn more at capella.
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Maggie O'Farrell
Edu.
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Terry Gross
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 Wilde for her performance as Anya Shakespeare, William Shakespeare's wife. O' Farrell co wrote the film screenplay with its director, Chloe Zhao. Maggie o' Farrell spoke to FRESH air's executive producer Sam Brugger about her new novel, Land. Here's Sam.
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Sam Brigger
Hamnet is a fictionalized version of the story of William Shakespeare and his wife, Anges 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 Woman'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 and 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 17 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.
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Maggie O'Farrell
Thank you so much for having me. It's lovely to be here.
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Sam Brigger
So can you tell us what the spark was for your new book, Land?
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Maggie O'Farrell
Oh, 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 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 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 was always interested me, but I could never really see a way forward to making 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. A 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.
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Sam Brigger
So, I mean, not to give too much away, but this book does really map the history of your family there.
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Maggie 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 about them.
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Sam Brigger
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?
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Maggie 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 earth to draw, to scratch into the rock, this exquisite rendering of their home, their fields and huts and that 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, 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 from colonialism.
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Sam Brigger
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 Ordinance Survey of which these maps are a part of?
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Maggie O'Farrell
Yes. So the Ordnance Survey was 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 a cess tax. There's 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 they could map the whole of Ireland in seven years. It actually took them almost 20. And they did have to employ Irish because 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 realised that he'd started in the late 1840s, it really stopped me in my track. Because, of course, anyone who knows anything about Irish history realises 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.
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Sam Brigger
Right. Because 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.
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Maggie O'Farrell
It is a necessary but an enviable part of his current task to distil 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. Thomas 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. 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.
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Sam Brigger
Thank you for reading that. What are the certain admittances that are mentioned there?
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Maggie 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 that there are many, many complicated political, socioeconom, 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 a 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, a punishment for people who were lazy.
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Sam Brigger
Tomas and his wife Serafina, they meet as children trapped in this workhouse. What did you learn about these workhouses in your research? Were these children basically enslaved?
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Maggie 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. Not only that, you had to basically give up your family, because when you went in, you were separated. Husband 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 Killari 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 for my daughter from Killari. And they said, we don't have anyone from Killari. 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. It's such a tragic representation of just a tiny administrative slip up, but the disaster that it causes in these, in both these people's lives. So I had to put a version of that into the. Into the novel.
- [11:12]
Sam Brigger
So on the peninsula, Tomas and his son come across a copse. That's a word that I only know from Winnie the Pooh. It's not a word I come across. 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.
- [12:11]
Maggie 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 wordship. Goes right back to the times of the Druids in Ireland. But some of them have been quite a lot of them have been co opted into Catholicism, into 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.
- [13:06]
Sam Brigger
Which is a treatment for psychiatric.
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Maggie O'Farrell
Yeah, which is a treatment even now for some mental illness. So it just goes to show that in all myth there is at least a seed of truth.
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Sam Brigger
Your father used to read to you Irish folktales as a kid.
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Maggie O'Farrell
Only Irish folktales. He would only ever read. Only Irish folktales.
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Sam Brigger
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 extra sensory perceptions. What did you. What did you take from those folktales in writing your books?
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Maggie 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 because we used to beg him to try and read the Moomins or Pippi Longstocking to us, but he would only 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, trees can speak, it has opinions. You know, it's actually a person that interacts in a sense, or it's a kind of. It's a. 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. 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. Which they were quite. I mean, they're teenagers now. They were a little bit skeptical about that. But the fish are very. In Irish mythology. And there's a. There's a wolfhound in the novel called Bran and he's called after Finn McCool's dog.
- [15:23]
Sam Brigger
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?
- [15:51]
Maggie O'Farrell
It's a tricky balancing act, I think. I think in order to create a scene in a cottage in 19th century Ireland and on the, 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 floor's made of, what the windows look like, what, what might be on the table, are they wearing any hats. 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 create. 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. 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.
- [17:06]
Sam Brigger
You were born in Ireland, but I don't think you spent much time living there, is that right?
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Maggie O'Farrell
No. As you can probably tell by the way I speak now, 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.
- [17:17]
Sam Brigger
You said that you're wary of claiming Irish heritage. So where does the idea of Ireland fit into your identity?
- [17:25]
Maggie O'Farrell
I wouldn't. I mean, maybe I said wary, but I think, you know, I can. 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. 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 have sounded completely different and I might have been a different person. But I suppose I feel. I feel quite Irish in Britain and I feel when I'm in Ireland, I feel quite British just for the way I talk, although my passport is Irish and always has been, and I'm very proud of that.
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Sam Brigger
Did you have any hesitancy about writing this very Irish novel because of any of those feelings?
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Maggie O'Farrell
I did, yes, I do. I suppose so, yeah. I don't ever. I hope nobody feels like I'm trespassing on anyone else's beliefs or. But it just felt. It just. It was a story that just wouldn't go away. And I don't know who else would have written about my great, great grandma. Yeah.
- [18:51]
Sam Brigger
It is based in your family history, so.
- [18:53]
Maggie O'Farrell
Yeah, I mean, yeah, when I was. 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 or Renaissance Florence. And I thought, oh, yeah, that's true, actually, and thought of it that way.
- [19:10]
Sam Brigger
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?
- [19:30]
Maggie 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 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 if, you know, if you happened to be literate or if your family happened or if friends and family were literate, you could potentially write to them. But that wasn't always the case. So, yeah, just it beggars belief really, that you would say goodbye to your friends and family and that was that you wouldn't see them again.
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Sam Brigger
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 co wrote the screenplay for the film from 2025 and her memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am 17 brushes with death. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Sam Brigger and this is FRESH air.
- [20:58]
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- [22:12]
Sam Brigger
Hi, this is Molly Sievin Esper, digital
- [22:14]
Maggie O'Farrell
producer at FRESH air.
- [22:15]
Terry Gross
And this is Terry Gross, host of the show.
- [22:18]
Maggie O'Farrell
One of the things I do is
- [22:19]
Terry Gross
write the weekly newsletter and I'm a newsletter fan. I read it every Saturday after breakfast the newsletter includes all the week shows, staff recommendations and Molly picks, timely highlights from the archives. It's a fun read.
- [22:31]
Maggie O'Farrell
It's also the only place where we
- [22:33]
Sam Brigger
tell you what's coming up next week,
- [22:34]
Terry Gross
an exclusive, so subscribe@whyy.org fresh air, and look for an email from Molly every Saturday morning.
- [22:44]
Sam Brigger
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 than 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?
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Maggie O'Farrell
Yes. I studied it at school when I was 16 for my Scottish hires, 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.
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Sam Brigger
Well, it's kind of emo, isn't it, the play?
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Maggie O'Farrell
Yeah. Just that teenagers who wear a lot of eye makeup who hang about in graveyards. And that was definitely me at the time.
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Sam Brigger
How did your understanding of the play change and Shakespeare changed 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?
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Maggie O'Farrell
I was very lucky in many ways that I had a particularly brilliant English literature teacher called Mr. Henderson. 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, 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 because it's the same name. And I knew that it was. 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.
- [24:34]
Sam Brigger
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, this 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 twenties, that feeling never really goes away. And I was just wondering, were you trying to create that feeling in the reader?
- [25:05]
Maggie 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 Hamlet is lucky if he gets maybe one or two mentions. And his. They said 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.
- [25:37]
Sam Brigger
Right. Which seems to try to soften the grief that people would feel.
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Maggie O'Farrell
Yes. The implication is that because it was, you know, death, that you were lucky enough, I think it was one, and you had a one in five chance of reaching your fifth birthday. In the 16th century in England, there was no shortage of things that could fail you, unfortunately. But the implication is that somehow it was less upsetting because you just had to get used to it. And I. I just never. I never believed that. And 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 because I just. 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.
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Sam Brigger
I mean, which is hard to imagine considering, like, who wrote better about grief than Shakespeare?
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Maggie O'Farrell
Well, yes, you just want to direct them and say, have you read any of the plays? Have you. Have you listened to, you know, Constance in King John talk about her son and him dying? You know, I mean, obviously, 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.
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Sam Brigger
You say that Hamnet is relegated to a footnote. Shakespeare's wife, Anne, or. And yes, I guess the names were interchangeable as well. Maybe had a slightly longer footnote, but not any better. Correct.
- [27:18]
Maggie O'Farrell
No, her footnotes were quite unkind, I think. 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 lured this boy genius into marriage. And people have written things like 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. And just to say, actually, maybe they did love each other. Maybe theirs was a partnership.
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Sam Brigger
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?
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Maggie 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. 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 around 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. 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. To give it the dignity I thought it deserved.
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Sam Brigger
You co wrote 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 enacted 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, the time constraints, whatever. Like, you have to lose so much of that.
- [29:52]
Maggie 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. 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, but 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 is a replica of it.
- [31:06]
Sam Brigger
Your book Land has been optioned by the same company that made Hamnet. Would you, I don't know if there they would ask you, but would you be willing to write the screenplay for that book adaptation as well?
- [31:19]
Maggie O'Farrell
I think I'd find it hard if I didn't. I don't think I would want to give it to someone else. It's such a it's a stole story, so close to my heart and so personal in a way, because 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 over.
- [31:35]
Sam Brigger
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 break. This is FRESH air. Brazil used to have one of the
- [31:46]
Maggie O'Farrell
fastest growing economies in the world.
- [31:48]
Sam Brigger
People called it the country of the future.
- [31:51]
Maggie O'Farrell
Their songs oh, Brazil, El pais do
- [31:54]
Sam Brigger
Futur, because it seems like we have it all, man. But then the music stopped on the Planet Money podcast.
- [32:00]
Maggie O'Farrell
A lot of countries these days aren't
- [32:01]
Sam Brigger
rich, they aren't poor. They're just kind of stuck in the middle. Why is that? Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 okay. 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've. You dealt with was you were left with a stammer. You went to a speech therapist in your. In your 30s. I think that seems to have helped a lot. And what did you learn from the therapy?
- [32:42]
Maggie O'Farrell
Oh, so much. I. So I started stammering as quite a young child, and when I was little, it manifested as the kind of classic 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. Because it wasn't long until someone at school made fun of me and I thought, oh, okay, 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 come. 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 that trigger the stammer. Yeah, there's usually a kind of problem letter or a pronunciation or a diphthong or collection of letters that's problematic. One of mine was M, which is very tricky when your name is Maggie.
- [33:47]
Sam Brigger
Great.
- [33:49]
Maggie O'Farrell
Yeah, 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. I couldn't launch off on an M sound, I would. 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. Mmm. And, 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 in 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, okay, well, if I want to avoid that sound or that word, which is really hard even now, I practise 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.
- [35:06]
Sam Brigger
So you don't try to avoid those words when you're writing?
- [35:10]
Maggie O'Farrell
No, that's one of the absolute joys of writing, honestly. So being a writer is. Yeah, 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 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 because 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 still terrible.
- [36:04]
Sam Brigger
That's making me smile.
- [36:05]
Maggie O'Farrell
Yes, exactly. 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 okay, I got through it. But honestly, I've never quite recovered from that. And, well, I'm sorry to spring a
- [36:17]
Sam Brigger
reading upon you today.
- [36:18]
Maggie O'Farrell
No, it's fine, because I've got it all. I've got it all marked up. And I thought, okay, 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 asked me my name and I couldn't get it out. And the woman behind the counter laughed and said, oh, you've 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 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. I mean, it's such a simple piece of advice, but I think, 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. You know, it took me until I was 41 for someone to say, it's okay, just tell people.
- [37:32]
Sam Brigger
In the book, you list the lingering effects from your encephalitis and the challenges it presents to you on a daily basis. Like, 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.
- [37:55]
Maggie O'Farrell
Yeah, I hate that.
- [37:56]
Sam Brigger
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. I think you only told one person as a young adult. What was your reason for hiding that part of you?
- [38:19]
Maggie O'Farrell
Well, I think I moved from Wales to Scotland when I was about 13. And 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 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 mum and dad, I don't want anyone to know. I want to, you know, just be. I 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.
- [39:25]
Sam Brigger
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?
- [39:35]
Maggie O'Farrell
Well, I never really talked about it before written about I mean, I'd written about it in fiction. I wrote about the illness. 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. So I spoke. 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 you look at things differently.
- [40:16]
Sam Brigger
Do you still sort of think of yourself in that in the way of someone who has avoided these brushes with death?
- [40:23]
Maggie O'Farrell
I do. 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 the life I have has been a huge bonus. So I just feel I have to make the most of it and live it to the absolute fullest.
- [40:53]
Sam Brigger
Well, Maggie o', Farrell, thank you so much for coming on today.
- [40:56]
Maggie O'Farrell
That's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me again.
- [40:59]
Terry Gross
Maggie o' Farrell spoke with FRESH air's executive producer Sam Brigger. Her new novel is called Land. Coming up, Maureen Corrigan reviews Mary Beard's new book, Talking Classics. This is FRESH air.
- [41:12]
Announcer
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- [41:39]
Maggie O'Farrell
another big week in the run up to the midterms primaries in half a dozen states including California, where new congressional maps are in place and a chaotic race for governor is wide open. We're also following gas prices and Iran. So far, talk of a peace deal is just talk. We'll keep you posted. Listen every morning up first on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [42:02]
Terry Gross
Mary Beard taught classics for most of her life at Cambridge, but her career has also included popular TV shows and books that reach a wide audience. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan says Beard's latest book, Talking Classics, illuminates a lot about the ancient world and our own
- [42:20]
Mary Beard
Wine comes in at the mouth, and love comes in at the eye. That's a line from a Yeats poem appropriately entitled A Drinking Song. Love did indeed come in at the eye for the distinguished classic scholar Mary Beard. In her new book called Talking Classics, Beard, who grew up middle class in an English village, recalls being taken as a child by her mother for her first visit to London in 1960. They wandered through the British Museum and stopped to see the mummies. Beard, however, became curious about a display case featuring everyday objects, including a 4,000-year-old piece of bread. Beard's mother tried to lift her up for a closer look, but as Beard confesses in the droll way that has endeared her to millions of readers and television audiences, the attempt failed because I was a heavy and wiggly child. Along came a kindly curator who drew keys out of his pocket, unlocked the case and held the ancient piece of bread in front of little Mary Beard's eyes. As Beard says, that experience was what the ancient Greeks would have called a moment of thauma, meaning wonder or wonderment. I don't think it's fanciful to say that Mary Beard has spent her life unlocking the deep past and encouraging thauma in the rest of us. Most of Talking Classics is drawn from four lectures Beard gave at the University of Chicago in 2023. If the word lectures makes you want to head for an exit door, you don't know Mary Beard style. This is a public intellectual who uses terms like slime bag to describe Medea's husband and who advises everyone to dial down the pious reverence when considering the ancient world. Beard also has little love for the exclusionary side of studying the classics or for those conservative traditionalists she dubs the column crowd who want to erect classical architecture in contemporary cities because of the authority it appears to exude. One of the many hard questions Beard considers in this book is whether classical architecture and statuary are irredeemably tainted by the uses to which they've been put by, say, Mussolini or today's far right racist groups. Beard reminds us that there's also radical, disruptive power in the classics. Among the revolutionaries she names with more than a foothold in classics are Karl Marx, Nelson Mandela, Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Seale. The overarching question about the ancient world that structures Beard's slim little book and her life's work is one that she says was very nearly drummed out of me when I was a student. What on earth was it like to be there? I'd say it's also the question that powers the geyser of contemporary reimaginings of the ancient world, among them novels like the Song of Achilles and Circe, both by Madeline Miller, as well as the forthcoming Christopher Nolan film the Odyssey. As much as she treasures connection with the deep past, Beard cautions us that the classical world is also unthinkingly alien, sometimes almost incomprehensible. It goes right down to everyday ideas about the body, the self, and to such basic questions as who am I? Don't forget, Beard says, that most people in antiquity would have no clue what they looked like except from their wavering reflection in a pool of water or from a dull outline on a piece of polished bronze or silver. No wonder so many ancient jokes hinged on issues of mistaken identity. The payoff, to put it bluntly, of studying classics and more broadly, of a humanities education is, according to Beard, best encapsulated in a phrase she gleaned from a colleague who said, classics teaches you to read difficult things. Beard goes on to elaborate that in a global environment of fact dodging, misreporting, conspiracy theories, fake news and outright lies, skills in reading difficult things are those that the world most needs, like that ancient hunk of Egyptian bread that fascinated Mary Beard as a child. Talking Classics offers readers plenty to chew on.
- [47:44]
Terry Gross
Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed Talking Classics by Mary Beard tomorrow on Fresh air. When Pope Leo was revealed to have Creole roots in New Orleans and grandparents who changed their racial identity to white after settling in Chicago, journalist Susan Solni recognized the story. Her great uncle Edward had done the same thing a century ago. She'll tell us what she discovered about his life and the secret that broke her family in half. I hope you'll join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews. Follow us on Instagram prfreshair. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Ann Marie Boldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly Sivi Nesper. Susan Yakundi directed today's show. Our co host is Tanya Moseley. I'm Terry Gross.
- [48:58]
Announcer
This message comes from Thumbtack Some tasks can feel easy, but home projects can bring second guesses. Is that noise? Nor is that water damage. Who should be called? That's where Thumbtack comes in. Just upload a photo or voice note and it uses AI powered search to match with the right top rated local pro. So instead of guessing, there's clarity and confidence. When hiring for your next home project, try thumbtack. Hire the right Pro Today the surreal horror film Backrooms is a smash.
- [49:29]
Sam Brigger
The Director is a 20 year old YouTuber and it's based on his popular web series. Why is this online phenomenon taking off at the box office? We get into it it on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour.
- [49:41]
Announcer
Listen via the NPR app or wherever
- [49:43]
Sam Brigger
you get your podcasts.