Best Of: Novelist Maggie O’Farrell / A personal history of the N-Word

Maggie O'Farrell’s new novel, Land, is a haunting, myth-infused exploration of grief, memory, and Irish identity, rooted in her own family’s history. The story follows a father and son mapping post-Famine Ireland, where the land itself becomes a living, sentient force—echoing the Irish folklore that shaped O’Farrell’s childhood. She reveals how her father’s exclusive reading of Irish myths planted the seeds of her storytelling DNA, and how writing about her great-grandfather felt both like a personal reckoning and a necessary act of remembrance. Her earlier novel, Hamnet, was born from a fury at how Shakespeare’s son was reduced to a statistic in history—she wanted to restore his humanity, and with it, the profound grief that birthed Hamlet. In a deeply personal segment, O’Farrell discusses her lifelong stammer, how it forced her to master linguistic agility, and how finally confronting it in her 40s—through a therapist’s simple directive to say, 'I have a stammer'—liberated her from shame. Meanwhile, historian Elizabeth Stordor Pryor, daughter of Richard Pryor, recounts her decades-long academic study of the N-word, a word her father weaponized in comedy. Her journey to publicly reveal her identity was slow, driven by pain, pride, and the paradox of a father who both used and ultimately rejected the slur. Her book, Something We Said, becomes a meditation on power, identity, and the complex legacy of a word that can wound and liberate in equal measure.