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Readers' rating:
Published Apr 2013
256 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
A vividly powerful memoir of a young woman who fought for years to change who she was until she finally found her voice and learned to embrace her imperfection.
Imagine waking up one day to find your words trapped inside your head, leaving you unable to say what you feel, think, want, or need. At the age of seven that happened to Katherine Preston. From that moment, she began battling her stutter and hiding her shame by denying there was anything wrong. Seventeen years later, exhausted and humiliated, she made a life-changing decision: to leave her home in London and spend a year traveling around America meeting hundreds of stutterers, speech therapists, and researchers. What began as a vague search for a cure became a journey that debunked the misconceptions shrouding the condition, and a love story that transformed her conception of what it means to be normal.
Shedding light on an ancient condition that affects approximately 4 million people in the United States and 60 million people worldwide, Preston has assembled an anthology of expertise and experience. In addition to specialists in the field, she interviews celebrities, writers, musicians, social workers, psychologists, and financiers—men and women from all walks of life battling their difficulties with speech. A heartwarming memoir and a journalistic feat, Out With It is more than a chronicle of one of the most prevalent speech problems in the world; it's a story about understanding yourself, and learning to embrace the voice within.
"Starred Review. Never saccharine or pandering, Preston's book is a triumph of telling your story without fear or glossing over the harder to look at details." - Publishers Weekly
"An inspiring memoir.... Readers expecting a fairy-tale ending when they finish the book can't have been reading very closely, but Preston comes to a truce with stuttering, and her battles with it make for engaging reading." - Kirkus Reviews
"Out With It is both a compassionate, unflinching memoir and an anatomy of life with a stammer. Katherine Preston offers affirmation for the millions of us who live with a speech disfluency and practical insight for those who don't. I highly recommend this astute and engaging book." - David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas
"Katherine Preston is an upbeat and inspiring example of how to deal with a problem that concerns so many and yet is acknowledged by so few. Out With It deserves the widest possible audience." - Michael Palin, actor, author, and founder of the Michael Palin Centre for Stammering Children
"Katherine Preston's memoir is an astute and personal exploration on the human experience.... A must-read." - Emily Blunt, actress
This information about Out With It was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Katherine Preston is the author of Out With It: How Stuttering Helped Me Find My Voice. At the age of twenty-four she left her home and career in London and moved to America to spend a year facing her greatest fear. Out With It recounts the journey that she went on to come to terms with her stutter. She is a writer, public speaker and her work has appeared in Salon, The Forward and The Telegraph. Raised in England, she currently lives in the USA.
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