Stuttering: A Life Bound Up In Words - Hardcover

Jezer, Marty

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465081274 ISBN 13: 9780465081271

Publisher: Basic Books, 1997

Synopsis

“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, silences, and the pleasures and pitfalls of everyday communication.With eloquence and passion, Jezer delves into his lifelong struggle with fluent speech. “I live on both sides of the disability dilemma,” he says. “As long as I keep silent, I look like a normal fluent person. But every time I talk, I put this identity on the line. The need to speak and the probability of stuttering are the dominant facts of my life.”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.However unique stuttering is as a disability, the daily embarrassments and deeper psychic indignities that stutterers face are commonplace. The defeats of giving into them and the triumphs of overcoming them are, as Jezer writes, the drama of life.Aristotle described the stutterer's tongue as “too sluggish to keep pace with the imagination.” Quite the contrary; Marty Jezer may stutter, but he is seldom at a loss for words.

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Reviews

An engaging autobiography focusing on the author's lifelong struggle to achieve verbal and metaphysical fluency. Jezer (Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel, 1992, etc.), a '60s revolutionary, a supporter of environmentalism and feminism, and a chronicler of New Age self-fulfillment, focuses here on the mechanical and psychological dynamics of his chronic, often severe, stuttering. Even before getting involved in the author's childhood traumas, the reader must adjust to a plethora of technical terms involving the mechanics of speech, along with competing theories and therapies to contain disfluency. But that adjustment is easy because Jezer, when he's discussing relevant bits of genetics, neurology, or psychology, never loses sight of the universality of themes like human communication, vulnerability, and self-worth. In fact, there's a nice mix of the personal and the general throughout. The snapshots of Jezer's long struggle are vivid. Growing up ``loquacious in thought'' only, he requires ``an act of God'' to spare him from sounding like ``Porky Pig . . . reciting a prayer in a Jewish temple'' at his bar mitzvah. The pain of growing up with a handicap in the ``it's all in your mind'' '50s doesn't much moderate as the author, now grown, copes with employment and relationship problems. This highly communicative writer describes the stutterer's fear of telephones and tape recorders, and describes various speech therapists, their methods, philosophies, and relative successes. We also discover that the breathy speech of Marilyn Monroe and the oratorical exactness of Winston Churchill were the results of compensating for their stuttering. Jezer, the Bronx adman who takes on union busters and Klansmen, matures into a ponytailed Vermonter who finally achieves 60 percent fluency after overcoming laryngospasm and mastering continuity with syllable-stretching exercises. A ``Zen and the Art of Speech Therapy,'' deftly mingling the particulars of a humiliating struggle with the wider disruptions and challenges of life. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Marty Jezer spent much of his life dreading such ordinary tasks as making phone calls, asking directions, or ordering food, because he stutters. His moving and motivating memoir is an account of Jezer's attempts to deal with a speech disfluency that he defines as not a mere motor disorder, but, rather, a genetically based, organic disposition affecting the entire person. Jezer discusses the causes, cures, and prevention of disfluency, stresses that stuttering is never anyone's fault, and advises that advances made during treatments often do not transfer to the real world. He himself tried medications, deep breathing, sensory deprivation, speech classes, therapy, and psychoanalysis until discovering an appliance called an Edinburgh masker that generates white noise to mask the sound of the stutterer's own voice. Jezer's speech improved so much that he discovered a newfound talkativeness, abandoned his frustrations, and became his own hero--all in the face of a dysfunction for which the only absolute cure is silence. A valuable addition to any general collection. Patricia Hassler

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0465081274
• ISBN 13: 9780465081271
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288