I Am, I Am, I Am – book review: An extraordinary memoir by Maggie O’Farrell

I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death by Maggie O’Farrell (Tinder Press, £18.99)

What follows is a chilling event, unflinching in fact and emotion, setting the tone for this remarkable book.

I Am, I Am, I Am recounts the 17 times when novelist O’Farrell has narrowly escaped death. There are episodes of near drowning, of life-threatening miscarriages, of amoebic parasites. There are close shaves with cars, with turbulent planes and a knife-point robbery in Chile.

As an award-winning writer of seven novels including Instructions For A Heatwave and This Must Be The Place, O’Farrell is renowned for her emotional acuity. One chapter in I Am, I Am, I Am explores a doctor’s failure to listen to her medical history, which causes her near-death during childbirth and provokes outrage at the arrogance of the doctors she encounters.

And yet, at the end of the same chapter, while the surgeons are “stitching and stapling me together again” after an emergency Caesarean section, an anonymous “man in beige” in the operating theatre shows her tenderness and compassion in a moving conclusion to the story.

One of the striking features of the book is the respect O’Farrell shows her secondary characters. Whether ex-boyfriends, her husband, her friends or her children, she tells you as much as you need to know without ever betraying those around her.

With all these incidents, there is a sense – sometimes explicit, usually implicit – of how they have contributed to O’Farrell’s career as a writer. On a plane ride to Hong Kong, “suddenly the plane is falling, dropping, plummeting, like a rock thrown from a cliff”.

O’Farrell had been mourning her disappointing degree result and the academic life she would no longer live. But by the end of the chapter, “in the monsoon season, when the rain is a constant… I started to write”.

I Am, I Am, I Am is an extraordinary book. Each of O’Farrell’s experiences would be anecdote enough in their own right, but collectively they recount an extraordinary life thus far lived. The writing is beautifully restrained and all the more emotionally powerful for it.

And this is a book of extraordinary courage: the courage to have survived these “seventeen brushes with death” and the courage to write about them with such searing candour. It is a profoundly affecting, powerful and life-affirming book. 

If you only read one memoir this year, make it O’Farrell’s.