Weekend Book Review: I Am, I Am, I Am

Keeping with the theme of my earlier post on how death can bring about the opportunity to appreciate the beauty in life, I bring you a review of Maggie O’Farrell‘s memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. O’Farrell is the author of multiple international best sellers, including, Hamnet, Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020, and her most recent, The Marriage Portrait.

I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death by Maggie O’Farrell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Genre: Memoir

Edition Reviewed: Audiobook Narrated by Daisy Donovan

Published February 6th 2018 by Random House Audio (first published August 22nd 2017)

If, as Maggie O’Farrell’s memoir suggests, we are never closer to life than when we brush up against the possibility of death, then she is as close as one can get. In I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death O’Farrell describes in vivid detail her close calls, whether inflicted on her by dangerous men, virulent viruses or nature. Seventeen, I thought, no one has that many encounters with death… oh, but some in fact do, and one has written an amazing homage to life and its complexities.

Reading these heart-pounding calamities does make you contemplate your own mortality. “We are, all of us, wandering about in a state of oblivion, borrowing our time, seizing our days, escaping our fates, slipping through loopholes, unaware of when the axe may fall,” she observes. I think it’s a protective device we are equipped with, a veil over our eyes and our conscious thoughts that keep us from pondering the “what ifs” of every situation. But what if, in addition to all the brushes you had experienced yourself, you had a child who is so immuno-compromised that a step outside the front door harbors their potential demise? What if you had to contemplate every what if? O’Farrell knows this existence and she still chooses to squeeze every drop of experience out of life. So sanguine about death, so aware of mortality, she pushes herself to life of abundance and fullness. “I swam in dangerous waters, both metaphorically and literally. It was not so much that I didn’t value my existence but more that I had an insatiable desire to push myself to embrace all that it could offer.”

O’Farrell’s iridescent prose and lulling narrative lists pull you into her story and keeps you glued to your seat. I sat in the car in my work parking lot refusing to turn it off even though I’d be late. This is important material. Her remarkable life has given her a perspective not often experienced and beautifully expressed. The chapter about raising her brave daughter who has life-threatening allergies and severe eczema made me cry. The physical agony endured by her infant, the crushing mental agony of a mother watching her suffer while unable to get the right help for her. The echoes of her own childhood illness that confounded doctors and dragged her parents through hell. It reaches into your core and grabs hold.

It will have you asking why, and how, but mostly it will make you revere this woman and her strong, indomitable spirit.



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