Stuttering

"As a stutterer who is always afraid of speaking but is rarely able to keep his mouth shut, I have a story to tell." So writes Marty Jezer in this insightful and invaluable book about stuttering that, by necessity, is also a work about speaking, silence, and the pleasures and pitfalls of everyday communication.

This is a book about denial, fear, persistence, pluck, and ultimate triumph. With humorous and poignant personal anecdotes, Jezer recalls being a student, too embarrassed to speak in class yet humiliated by his own chosen silence. Afraid to phone girls, he found ingenious ways to ask them out on dates. Apprehensive about raising children, he delighted in reading to his daughter. Told at a job interview that he was unemployable, he created his own career.

In an endless effort to "cure" his stuttering, Jezer has tried many kinds of speech therapy and psychotherapy; he's meditated, practiced oration, and done deep breathing; he's even volunteered as a guinea pig to test an experimental drug for the National Institutes of Health. Supportive, though critical, of existing therapies, he is insistent that issues of identity, self-acceptance, and self-esteem are as vital as fluency techniques.

Through the examples of new-found friends in the self-help movement for people who stutter, he learned to take responsibility for his speech. Although Jezer still stutters, he is no longer afraid to speak.