A review by honeyedorange
Out with It: How Stuttering Helped Me Find My Voice by Katherine Preston

5.0

It was such a pleasure to see that this memoir was on my reading list for a class on fluency I am enrolled in. Almost immediately after I cracked it open, I could anticipate the great joy of following Katherine Preston's journey towards self-acceptance. As a person with a chronic condition around which there is some stigma, I can begin to imagine the desire she had to push away the stutter and even conceptualize it as separate from her identity. In the book, the stutter is compared to a "good-for-nothing husband who would be sweet for weeks on end and then come back to push me around," (224) and also to a "wily opponent who encamped himself in [her] body and ensured that [her] personal battlefield was always in flux" (76). In my eyes, the process of reintegrating this part of herself she once described as a "dirty secret" took on the aspect of deep inner work, piecing together the "mythology" of her past into something cohesive, making sense of what might have been fragmentary by putting her impressions into words. Integration becomes possible by listening to others' stories, hundreds of stories that have been distilled to morsels interspersed throughout so that the triumphs, insights, and pain of others aren't simply retold but examined and reflected on in relation to the listener's experiences with stuttering. The stutterers mentioned represent a wide swathe of experiences with stuttering. While the author makes the personal decision to embrace her stutter, she doesn't discredit those who strive for greater fluency. I love the honest conversations she has with her parents and friends, the way she learns to speak up unapologetically, and the reflections on her shifting attitude towards her stutter. I wished for more chapters and more specifics on her journeys across America and to read more about how the aim evolved as she confronted the research, technology, and techniques available. Her opinions as someone directly impacted by advances in the field would have been notable.