Near Death
Book Review
I am, I am, I am: Seventeen brushes with death,
by Maggie O’Farrell (Penguin, $40, Hachette)
Reviewed by Wendy Montrose
I am, I am, I am is a memoir with a difference. Subtitled Seventeen Brushes With Death, it tells the story of Maggie O’Farrell’s life in a series of near-death encounters at different ages: ‘Snatches of a life, a string of moments.’ From a childhood illness O’Farrell wasn’t expected to survive to a life-saving dash with her own dangerously ill child, I am, I am, I am is a collage of some of the experiences that made her who she is.
O’Farrell writes each event as though she is living it now and imbues them with all the feeling she must have relived with every word. How she articulates her pain after a miscarriage, her terror in the face of danger, her teenage dissatisfaction, her maternal distress is so real, so sincere that you feel each event, and recognise them.
‘In moments like these, your thinking shrinks, sharpens, narrows. The world shutters up and you are reduced to a crystalline pinpoint, to a single purpose:’