Montreal cartoonist Jean-Sébastien Bérubé opens up about stutter in new graphic memoir

Montreal cartoonist Jean-Sébastien Bérubé has long told stories about himself through comics, but his newest book opens a door he kept locked for most of his life. In 'Toujours sur scène – Vivre avec le b-b-bégaiement' (Always on Stage – Living with the St-st-stutter), the artist now in his forties chronicles his decades spent stammering, hiding, and finally, accepting the neurodevelopmental condition that shaped his entire existence.

Bérubé is best known for his historical graphic novels—particularly a celebrated series about the explorer Radisson. But he spent years convinced his own stutter was too private, too shameful, to interest readers. That changed when he discovered the Association bégaiement communication, a peer-support group for adults who stammer based in Montreal. There, a volunteer said something that stopped him cold: "Stuttering is beautiful."

"I could not believe that," he writes in the memoir's opening pages. At 42, after a lifetime of trying to stop stammering, he encountered a radical proposition.

Growing up, Bérubé was mocked at school and by adults, sometimes even by teachers. The shame of stammering infiltrated his social and romantic life so deeply that he learned to stay silent rather than risk ridicule. He pursued countless treatments—some absurd, from exercises with buttons in his mouth to an encounter with Alejandro Jodorowsky, the surrealist filmmaker, who suggested a form of physical exorcism. None worked. What they did do was reinforce the false belief that his stutter was a personal failure, a flaw in his confidence or will.

Through the ABC group, Bérubé came to understand that stammering is a neurological difference, not a character defect. "I was born with this," he explains. "It's not my fault if I stammer. So there's no point beating myself up over it." People who stammer know exactly what they want to say; they simply stumble over the sounds. It is a neurodevelopmental trait, as inherent as left-handedness.

His book is not a medical treatise. It is a lived narrative—raw, illustrated in his distinctive style—that documents the anger and isolation stammering inflicted on him, and the unlikely liberation that came from simply accepting it.