People Still Read Books: John Hendrickson

An interview with the author of “Life on Delay: Making Peace With a Stutter”

I host the People Still Read Books podcast once a month, a podcast where I talk to authors about their books, their process, their fears, the excitement and terror of writing a book. (It’s also partly a way to help promote my upcoming novel The Time Has Come.) You can listen to the conversation on the podcast feed, but with each show, we’ll post an edited transcript of the podcast here.

This month’s guest is John Hendrickson, editor at The Atlantic and author of the moving, empathetic and funny Life on Delay: Making Peace With a Stutter. John talks about how the book came about, the journey he went on while writing it and the stuttering community he discovered along the way. This is a fantastic book, and you should buy it, right now, wherever books are sold.

Leitch: One of the things that I really found striking about it, and I think the reason it works so well, it is deeply empathetic. You write in the book how, when you were working on the Joe Biden story for The Atlantic, you met his debate coach, Michael Sheehan, who also has a stutter, he told you that people with a stutter “often have the gift of immense empathy.” Do you agree with that statement? Was that something you were conscious of…