Speech Team: A Novel by Timothy Murphy

I picked up this book by chance, walking past it in my local public library. I know we’re not “supposed” to judge books by their covers, but I do. When I turned the inner flap to read the synopsis, I knew immediately I had to read it.

The premise is that a member of a high school debate team commits suicide later in life, and a former team mate and friend sees this on social media. In the suicide post left behind, is an accusation against the teacher who ran the debate team, that he had said some awful things. What follows is a series of enlightening conversations between the surviving friends, revealing that all the team mates experienced some kind of denigrating treatment at the hands of the debate teacher.

As an educator, I know that the words I say have an incredible impact on my students, for the better and for the worse, though I hope for the former. Sometimes I say things I wish I had said differently, or not at all. The semester before I read Speech Team I had a student breakdown in my office during a private meeting. They were debilitatingly afraid of submitting their assignments to me, for fear that I’d be disappointed. They told me that in middle school, they overheard a teacher telling someone else how disappointed the teacher was in them, thinking that the subject wouldn’t hear. The teacher had expected more of my student and was complaining to another person. It cut deep and my student never forgot it, and it ruined their experience of school forever.

The story is supported by Murphy’s excellent prose. Like most literary fiction, it is deeply introspective and thoughtful in its content and approach. Murphy excavates what has become a quotidian trauma — the rod-wielding nun, the grouchy math teacher, the demanding and unyielding debate team teacher — drawing out complex feelings, leading to even more complex and perplexing actions/reactions. Readers will find a piece of themselves in these characters, perhaps more than one.

This is an extraordinary tale of an ordinary epiphany: what happens when we discover there is more than one authentic version of our past, sometimes hidden from ourselves by ourselves, and that the view of it looks different from other angles and through other eyes. That sometimes it takes time to understand our traumas.

Speech Team struck a nerve. I couldn’t put it down. I had to know what happened. If you’re a teacher of any kind, read this, and re-read it.