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Life on Delay
- USA Today Book Club
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
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Publisher's Summary
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • USA TODAY BOOK CLUB PICK • ONE OF AUDIBLE'S BEST BIOS AND MEMOIRS OF 2023 • “A raw, intimate look at [Hendrickson's] life with a stutter. It’s a profoundly moving book that will reshape the way you think about people living with this condition.”—Esquire • A candid memoir about a lifelong struggle to speak.
“Life On Delay brims with empathy and honesty . . . It moved me in ways that I haven’t experienced before. It’s fantastic.”—Clint Smith, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller How the Word Is Passed
“I can’t remember the last time I read a book that made me want to both cry and cheer so much, often at the same time.”—Robert Kolker, best-selling author of Hidden Valley Road
In the fall of 2019, John Hendrickson wrote a groundbreaking story for The Atlantic about Joe Biden’s decades-long journey with stuttering, as well as his own. The article went viral, reaching listeners around the world and altering the course of Hendrickson’s life. Overnight, he was forced to publicly confront an element of himself that still caused him great pain.
He soon learned he wasn’t alone with his feelings: strangers who stutter began sending him their own personal stories, something that continues to this day. Now, in this reported memoir, Hendrickson takes us deep inside the mind and heart of a stutterer as he sets out to answer lingering questions about himself and his condition that he was often too afraid to ask.
In Life on Delay, Hendrickson writes candidly about bullying, substance abuse, depression, isolation, and other issues stutterers like him face daily. He explores the intricate family dynamics surrounding his own stutter and revisits key people from his past in unguarded interviews. Listeners get an over-the-shoulder view of his childhood; his career as a journalist, which once seemed impossible; and his search for a romantic partner. Along the way, Hendrickson guides us through the evolution of speech therapy, the controversial quest for a “magic pill” to end stuttering, and the burgeoning self-help movement within the stuttering community. Beyond his own experiences, he shares portraits of fellow stutterers who have changed his life, and he writes about a pioneering doctor who is upending the field of speech therapy.
Life on Delay is an indelible account of perseverance, a soulful narrative about not giving up, and a glimpse into the process of making peace with our past and present selves.
What the critics say
“Hendrickson has cultivated an undeniable gift for concise metaphors, distilling potentially long-winded explanations into memorable images, briskly delivered. . . . He movingly describes not only his own experience of trying to speak to others but also his constant awareness of their experience of him. . . . All of this is seamlessly recounted, threading together science and emotion, ideas and experience.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
“Mold-breaking . . . Astutely illuminates the complexity of disfluency . . . Life on Delay recasts stuttering and, in doing so, challenges long-standing attitudes toward disability. By drawing deftly from personal experience, research, others’ stories and his wellspring of empathy, Hendrickson transforms the disorder he avoided claiming for decades into an invitation to all of us to demonstrate genuine humanity. . . . This full-hearted memoir grapples with shame, resentment and fear as Hendrickson answers with courage and compassion one of the most meaningful questions in life: ‘How do you accept an aspect of yourself that you’re taught at such an early age to hate?’”—Anna Leahy, The Washington Post
“[A] moving exploration . . . A wealth of fascinating detail . . . But the real draw lies in [Hendrickson’s] account of his personal experiences, which convey something essential about the challenge of being human.”—The New Yorker