'Hamnet' novelist Maggie O'Farrell maps her Irish roots in 'Land'

Primaries and 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. This is Fresh Air, I'm Terry Gross. Our guest is author Magio Farrell. She's best known for her 2020 novel HamNet. It was adapted into a movie last year, and Jessie Buckley won an Oscar for her performance as Anus Shakespeare, William Shakespeare's wife. Opharrell co-wrote the film screenplay with its director,

Chloe Zhao. Magio Farrell spoke to Fresh Air's executive producer Sam Bruger about her new novel, Land. Here's Sam. HamNet is a fictionalized version of the story of William Shakespeare and his wife, Anus 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. Opharrell's novel HamNet won Britain's Women's Prize for Fiction.

Magio Farrell has a new novel called Land. It takes place in Ireland in the 1860s, beginning with Tomas and Liam, an Irish father and ten-year-old son, Hought in foul weather, mapping up peninsula as part of the British ordinance survey of Ireland. Tomas, somewhere between employed and indentured to British soldiers, 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. Opharrell has written eight other novels, children's books and a memoir called IMIM. 17 brushes with death about, well, her brushes with death, nearly being murdered, nearly drowning, and her childhood and cephalitis, the left her with various balance and spatial recognition challenges. Maggie Opharrell, welcome back to fresh air. Thank you so much for having me. It's lovely to be here.

“So can you tell us what the spark was for your new bookland?”

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 legitimate, which as anyone knows anything about Catholicism is not a job you just happened

to fall into. It's something that you really, really commit yourself to and it takes years to train. He was a judge of work and then he left quite astonishingly, hence I, my existence and existence of my cousins and siblings. And he came full circle and became a mapper like his father. So the two of them was always really interested in 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, 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 a 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. So I mean not to give too much way, but this book does really map the history of your family there. 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. 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? 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 ionage map on the walls of a cave in what's now the Italian Elps and a

into the rock this exquisite rendering of their home, their fields and huts and the sort of town,

I suppose you would call it. And it's just such an interesting representation of the earth to say, this is who I am, this is where I am. But of course, you fast forward of 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 the from colonialism. And the maps that you're character, to moss 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 apart?”

Yes, so the ordinance survey was an organization, a British organization and at this point, of course, in 19th century island was a colony of Britain. And the British decided that they needed to map island in the 1820s and it was for taxation purposes, what's called the SES tax. There's still even now an island, an expression which means to sort of say, get lost or a curse is on you and it's bad sesty and that's where it comes from. So initially it was a

taxation purposes and they had an edict that no Irish would be employed, which didn't go very well. They initially thought that they could map out the whole island in seven years and 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 a fact that obviously when a British

army division arrived in a township, the Irish were naturally quite a lot unsuspicious 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 mathematical 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 at the late 1840s it really stopped me in my track because of course anyone I know is anything about Irish history realizes that those were the final years of the great famine. So obviously the human and physical geography of the land was completely changed and it just that short

decade. 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, therefore I 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. It is unnecessary but an enviable part of his current task to distill into ink symbols and order 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. Tomas 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 red coats 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 were bear an account of what happened, what was lost if it kills him. Thank you for reading that. What are these certain diminidences that are mentioned there? 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 with Belgium, they lost 50,000 people. Obviously, Ireland lost a million. Some people think that it'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, socio-economic, 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 Trevellian 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 who 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 and a punishment for people who

were lazy. Tomas and his wife, Seraphina, they meet as children trapped in this workhouse. What did you learn about these workhouses in your research? Were these children

basically enslaved? 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

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 swade of children, particularly had actually had no idea”

if they happened to survive, which was not a given. There's 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 Khilari and when she went into the workhouse they made a mistake and they put down as she was from Khilani and her father had emigrated to America and the rest of the family had died and he knew that there was one child who survived and he came back to

find her and he said, "I've come from my daughter from Khilari." And they said, "We don't have

anyone from Khilari." 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 skewed me through the heart. I, it's such a tragic representation of just a tiny administrative

“slip-up, but the disaster that it causes in these, in these both these people's lives,”

that's all I had to put a version of that into the novel. So on the peninsula, Tomas and a son come across a cops, that's a word that I only know from Winnie the Pooh, it's not a word of a comical expression. That'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, or 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. I've always been really fascinated by the Holy Welles or the Sacred Welles in Ireland.

I mean, they are everywhere. You can find them wherever you go. Most towns or villages, they'll be at least one, I would say. And some of them have been, you know, their ancient sort of pre-Christian pagan places of worship, go to right back to the times of the druids in Ireland, but some of them have been, I quite a lot of them have been co-opted into catholicism and Christianity and they've been blessed by a priest and given some bridge in the name,

some bridge as well, some Patrick's Welles, however. 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 interesting, there's one, a very famous one in County Cork, which is said to cure madness and recently somebody didn't analysis of it and apparently it has a very high level of lithium, which just goes to show, which is the treatment for

psychiatric. Yeah, which is the treatment of it even now for some mental illness. So it just goes to show that in all myth there is at least a seed of truth. Your father used to read to you Irish folk tales of the kid and only Irish fictons. He would only ever read Irish folk tales. And I sort of see magical elements in your books. There's haggs, 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 take from those folktales in writing your books?”

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 moments that all people long-stocking 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. It can trees can speak. It has opinions. It's actually a person interacts in a state or 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,

"Ah, I think my novels are going to have a talking fish in it." They were quite mean a teenager just now. They were a little bit skeptical about that. But the fish are very important in Irish mythology. And there's a wolfhound in the novel called "Bran." And he's called often the cool dog. You know both Hamlet and Lander 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 padded on the head and said, "Good job!" So how do you balance 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? 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 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 might be on the table, are they wearing any hats? You know everything are their dogs, are they? 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 the 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 at and take more at. You were born in Ireland, but I don't think you spent much time living there, is that right? 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. You said that you're wary of claiming Irish heritage. So where does the idea of Ireland fit into your

“identity? I mean, I mean, maybe I said wary, but I think, you know, I can't, 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 greating 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 with their names 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 quite Irish and Britain and I feel, but I'm in Ireland, I feel quite British just for those of the way I talk. Although my passport is Irish and it always has been and I'm very proud of that.

“Did you have any hesitancy about writing this very Irish novel because of any of those feelings?”

I did, yes. I do. I suppose so. Yeah, I don't know that I hope nobody feels like I'm trespassing on anyone else's beliefs or but it just felt, it was a story that just wouldn't go away and I don't know who else would have written about my great great great great great great. Yeah, it was based in your family has been sick. 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 16 centering England or Renaissance Lawrence and I thought, oh yeah, that's true. That's all that way. 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 immigration of so many people leaving like how do you think that plays out an Irish identity? I've heard it said that Ireland's biggest export is not in fact

Guinness. It's people and I've sure that's true. I think it's some, yeah, I mean, it's inevitable,

you know, and I always think immigration 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

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 happen to be”

literate of your family happened to our friends and family will literate. You could potentially write to them but that wasn't always the case. So yeah, just it's, it begs belief really that you would say goodbye to your friends and family and that was that, you wouldn't see them again. 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 Hamlet 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 Brieger and this is Fresh Air.

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So Maggie your book Hamlet tells the story of Anus and William Shakespeare, the family they create, the death of their son Hamlet at the age of 11. We think and the grief that they suffer and then 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? Yes, I studied at school when I was 16 for my Scottish tyres. And I absolutely loved it. I fell for it in a big way and it really got on the

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. What kind of email is an at the play?”

Yeah, just that continues to wear a lot of eye makeup behind the band Graviards and that was definitely me at the time. How did your understanding of the play change and Shakespeare changed when you learned that he had a son named Hamlet that was a name at the time that was interchangeable with Hamlet and that he wrote the play after the death of his son. I was very lucky in many ways that I had a particularly brilliant English literature teacher call Mr Henderson and he told us as we were

studying for the play when we were 16 that Shakespeare had a son who had been called Hamlet and that he died age 11 and that Shakespeare had gone on four years or so later to write the play Hamlet. And I was even I was really long way off from being a writer and a parent. This really struck me and I remember putting my finger over the L of in Hamlet on my school copy and taking it off again thinking that 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 play and appearance and a ghost the name of his dead son. I have to admit that I found the book very hard to read because I knew going in that Hamlet was going to die and it gave me this feeling of foreboding that I often felt as a parent the sort of constant vigilance that something is going to go wrong that I need to be watching

out for it and even like now in 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?”

I think the engine behind me writing Hamlet was a dissatisfaction with the way Hamlet himself had been treated by scholars and biographers of Shakespeare. 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 that the city 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. Right which seems to

try to soften the grief that people would feel. Yes the implication is that because it was you know death that you were lucky you know I think it was one and you had a one and five chance of reaching your fifth birthday in the 16th century in England there was no shortage of things that could

to get used to it and 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 Hamlet 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 is anything less than catastrophic to lose a child I just don't believe it. I mean which is hard to imagine considering like who wrote better about grief than Shakespeare. Well yes you just want to direct them say have you read any of the

things that you have you listen to you know constants in King John talk about her her son and

“him dying you know I mean obviously we I think we all know that nonsense you don't have to be a”

parent to know that nonsense so I think I just wanted to and I always felt that Hamlet 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 with that him we would not have Hamlet and we probably wouldn't have 12th night you say that that Hamlet is relegated to a footnote um Shakespeare's wife and or Anne yes I guess the names were interchangeable as well um maybe had a slightly longer footnote but but not any better

correct no her footnotes were kind on kind I think um 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 was who lured this boy genius into marriage and then they've 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 not reach other instead so I wanted to again to write to ask invite readers to forget everything they think they know about

Anne Hathaway which is always called I don't know what even though her name was Shakespeare for most of

her life um and just to say actually maybe they did love each other maybe there's was a partnership so as I said it was very hard for me to read him that sort of thinking about myself as a parent did you have similar feelings writing it as a parent yourself? I did find writing the scenes of hamlet's death and his the subsequent scene was laying out for burial very hard to write it's too I did and I didn't write them in the house when 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 instead 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 um and they were really hard but 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 you tore out the screenplay for the movie adaptation of hamlet and with the director Chloe Xiao 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 Anius is entranced by her husband's play by seeing these characters embodied and enacted but 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 yeah but the book is my baby and always will be”

and the film feels more like a maybe a niece or a nephew if you have 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 novelist to such we're all very much alone 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 specialty 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 to be the same as your book because you will be disappointed it could never be the same it's a completely

it's different but it needed to be different and that's a good thing it sits alongside the novel

rather than is it replica of it your book land has been optioned by the same company that made him it would you I don't know if they were they would ask you but would you be willing to write the

“screenplay for that book adaptation as well I think I 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 the way because it's about my family or it's based on the loads of my family so I think I would find it hard to hand over well let's take a short break here if you're just joining us our guest is Maggie Ofero her new novel is land more after break this is fresh air

this week on sources and methods what a piece deal between the US and Iran might look like

just as similar would it be to the Obama administration deal that president Trump ripped up if Trump allows some enrichment which is what the Iranians demand then everyone's going to be saying well wait a minute how was this different from what Obama had? plus more the week's biggest national security news on sources and methods listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts Maggie we're on the show in 2017 talking about your memoir but I just had a 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 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?”

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 okay no they can't hear it and by the time I was a teenager somehow I did 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 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 the trigger of this stammer yeah there's usually a kind of problem letter or a pronunciation or a diphthong or a collection of letters that's problematic one of mine was M which is

very tricky but sometimes actually yeah 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 at ask me what's your name because I couldn't I couldn't launch off on a sound 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 you know I don't think I would be 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 practice 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 so you don't try to avoid

those words when you're writing no that's one of the absolute joys of writing honestly so a bit of writer is yeah it's obviously being a stammerer and a writer helps you because you are you can perform these you've been performing grammatical and semantic gymnastics into a tiny but also just I cannot express them 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 that 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 so terrible because I 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

it's a terrible first making me so yeah exactly it was all and I came out of that interview and actually I remember thinking I don't have to say 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 so I'm sorry

it's a spring or reading a punch and I know it's fine because I've got it all back up and I thought okay I really have to do something about it so I did go to 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'd asked me my name and I couldn't get it out and they were in behind the count of laughter and said oh if you forgotten you're a name and I came out feeling so humiliated and I told the speech therapist about this 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 so 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'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 and you know it took me into the eye it was 41 that someone to say it's okay just tell people in the book you list the lingering effects from your encephalitis and the challenges it presents to you on a daily basis like you know it's hard to walk up and downstairs 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 yeah and you improve so much like

people thought you would never get out of a wheelchair at one point but when you were able to you

“really seem to hide these difficulties from other people yeah I think you only told one person”

as a young adult um what was your reason for hiding that part of you? Well I think I moved from Wales to Scotland when I was about 13 and I what where I lived in Wales everybody I was at school with new that I had had this very serious illness and 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 against

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 where you got to sport and I thought I could do that I could just completely start against it 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't put it behind you at all once you could wishfully undo it somehow you could wishfully edit it out for your life but of course you can't do that 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 mum well I never really talked about it before

written about I mean I grew in 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 I 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 you can't really leave these selves behind that they all travel along inside you like there's metroids god dolls

I suppose but yeah I think you're 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 do you still sort of think of yourself in that in the way of someone who has avoided these brushes with death I do and make 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 and so I just feel I have to make the most of it and live it to the absolute fullest well Maggie Ofero thank you so much for coming on today that's my pleasure thank you so much for having me again Maggie Ofero spoke with fresh airs executive producer Sam Brigger

this is fresh air Richard Reeves is unimpressed by online influencers who pedal ideas about

“hyper masculinity you're talking about boys and men where's your policy agenda you're good on podcasts”

but we've actually done a bunch of stuff of boys and men sorry what have you done ideas about the next era of manhood that's on the Ted radio hour podcast listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts Mary Beard taught classics for most of her life at Cambridge but her career is also included popular TV shows and books that reach a wide audience our book critic marine cargon says Beard's latest book talking classics illuminates a lot about the ancient world and our own

wine comes in at the mouth and love comes in at the eye that's a line from a yates 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 every day objects including a 4,000 year old piece of bread Beard's mother tried to lift her up for a closer look but his beard confesses in the drool 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 unlock 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 thama meaning wonder or wonder mint. I don't think it's fanciful to say that Mary Beard has spent her life unlocking the deep past and encouraging thama 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's style. This is a public intellectual who uses terms like slime back to describe Medias husband and to advise us everyone to dial down the highest 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 and 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 iridimably 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 revolutionary she names with more than a foothold in classics are Carl Marks

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 guiser of contemporary reimaginings of the ancient world. Among them novels like the song of Achilles and Searsy, 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 Cauchines 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

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 humanity's 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 Beard as a child, talking classics”

offers readers plenty to chew on. Marine Caragan 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 Solney 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 at NPR Fresh Air. 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 Philist Mayers, Roberta Shorock, and Rebuildenado, Lauren Crenzel, Theresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thayachalaner, Annabellman, and Nico Gonzalez-Wisseler. Our digital media producer

is Molly C.V. Nesper. Susan Nekundi directed today's show, "Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross." Hundreds of thousands of people came to the U.S. as small children as the only home they've ever known. And although they weren't citizens, many got special protections to keep living and working here. Now, though, they find themselves in legal limbo, as the Trump administration tightens the screws on immigrants. Listen to NPR's co-hosts

which podcasts in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.