I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell review – 17 brushes with death
We are all, in one way or another, just moments from death. Catastrophe lurks wherever we care to look. Most of us tend not to dwell on our mortality since that way madness lies, but many have stood on the precipice, often several times over, and stared it squarely in the face.
The writer Maggie O’Farrell has chronicled 17 of her own near misses in I Am, I Am, I Am (the title is taken from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar). These include a haemorrhage during childbirth, miscarriage, childhood encephalitis, amoebic dysentery and an ill-advised leap off a harbour wall into the sea as a teen. Written in self-contained essays, the events recalled here are blips, coincidences, flashes of folly or plain bad luck. Some are startling but later shrugged off; others are lingering and life-changing.
A Costa award-winning novelist known for her sophisticated narratives and emotional realism, O’Farrell has long avoided writing about herself, in part, she has said, to protect the privacy of her loved ones. But circumstances change and this, her eighth book, is her first autobiographical work. The idea came to her while caring for her eight-year-old daughter who has a severe immune disorder that has, as detailed here, repeatedly required life-saving treatment. On average her child suffers between 12 and 15 allergic reactions a year. If she eats something with a trace of nuts, or sits where someone might have consumed them, or near someone who might have eaten them, she might go into anaphylactic shock. Consequently, O’Farrell’s life “involves a fair amount of sprinting along hospital corridors. The nurses in our local A and E department greet [my daughter] by name. Her consultant allergist has told me several times that we should never take her outside the range of a good hospital.” This book is, then, O’Farrell’s way of letting her child know that, in facing down death on a regular basis, she is not alone. She is showing her that life is still possible.
Each chapter is named according to a part of the body – circulatory system, lungs, cranium, intestines and so on – underlining whichever area is, at that time, most in danger. There are some seriously hair-raising moments: while travelling in Chile, O’Farrell is seized from behind by a thief who presses a machete against her throat; on a flight to Hong Kong, when she is surrounded by nuns and priests, her plane suddenly plummets downwards “like the world’s most unpleasant fairground ride, like a dive into nothing, like being pulled by the ankles into the endless maw of the underworld”. Elsewhere, less dramatic events rather stretch the life-threatening parameters of the book’s subtitle. These include a close call with a passing lorry, an encounter with a circus knife-thrower and a scrabble for the lock as two strangers approach her car. But if imminent loss of life feels distant in these passages, the tension does not. As well as making sense of the extraordinary, O’Farrell’s expertise lies in finding significance in the ordinary, making connections and finding clarity where most might find fog.
Among the most chilling tales is in the opening chapter, “Neck”, in which O’Farrell is 18, awaiting her exam results and has found a job cleaning and serving food in a hotel “far away from everyone I know”. Between shifts she decides to walk up to a nearby tarn and passes a man on the way up. On the way back down he appears again and she realises that he has been waiting for her. There is a heart-stopping moment when, after following her down the hill and talking insistently about birds, he lifts up his binoculars and places the strap around her neck. Rather than fight, or scream, O’Farrell talks her way out of the situation, taking hold of the binoculars and prattling enthusiastically about ducks. Later she contacts the police but the incident is all but laughed off. But the following week she is visited by detectives investigating the rape and murder of a 22-year-old backpacker whose body was discovered near the path where she had been walking. She had been strangled using the strap from a pair of binoculars.
This is far from a conventional memoir. Rather than plot these micro-dramas chronologically, O’Farrell hopscotches across the decades, offering us a series of hugely evocative vignettes that point to multiple lives and identities. Thus, we meet her as a daughter, a student, an office worker, a mother, a wife and a traveller. We are privy to various moods and mindsets: in love, heartbroken, lonely, restless, rebellious, scared, purposeful. I Am, I Am, I Am isn’t purely about peril, it’s about the life lived either side of it. These snapshots, shared in extreme closeup, reveal a thoughtful and determined writer who, despite frequent trauma, remains resilient and unbowed.
Even so, there are episodes here that could defeat the hardiest of souls and, though she doesn’t deal in self-pity, O’Farrell herself concedes that “a near-death experience changes you for ever: you come back from the brink altered, wiser, sadder”. Only in the final chapter, in which she explains her daughter’s condition in detail, and how it is managed, do her anxiety, her vulnerability, her utter desolation at her child’s agony, bubble over.
While these experiences are unique to the author, there is a common thread in their telling. Each of these essays is underscored with the knowledge that such incidents can materialise in all our lives without warning. It’s with characteristic elegance that O’Farrell writes: “I know all too well how fine a membrane separates us from that place, and how easily it can be perforated.”
I Am, I Am, I Am is published by Tinder. To order a copy for £14.99 (RRP £18.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
