"Sidelights"

Katherine Preston's memoir Out with It: How Stuttering Helped Me Find My Voice tells the story of a young woman's personal odyssey to accept her speech impediment. Preston developed her stutter when she was only seven years old, and it marked her out among her peers. Attempts to solve the problem met with consistent failure. "As I was growing up, I created this myth that if I worked to better myself every day, I would eventually reach some nirvana of perfection where all my problems would disappear," Preston stated in an excerpt from her book published on the Today Books Web site. "I thought that hiding my stutter, or somehow magically growing out of my hesitant speech, was the only option. I saw my speech as something to be ashamed of, something only I did, something born of common laziness." At the age of twenty-four, the author decided to leave her job in London, move to America, and begin documenting the...