Cover Image: I Am, I Am, I Am

I Am, I Am, I Am

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Maggie O'Farrell's book is heartbreaking and gorgeous and a serious look at how we exist despite everything that seems to be working against our existing.

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I really enjoyed this book, made me wonder how many times I escaped a bad situation, and just how precious life is. Thank you Ms. O'Farrell for a well-written book that I enjoyed and wondered what was coming in the next chapter. Cleverly laid out and a unique book, not like any other that I have read before. Thank you for helping me realize how "lucky" I have been and that life is precious.

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Award winning British author Maggie O’Farrell has written an extremely unique memoir entitled I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death. (The primary title was inspired by Sylvia Plath’s the Bell Jar.).

O’Farrell is a mother and was inspired to write the memoir while caring for her eight-year-old daughter who has a severe immune disorder—so severe that she has multiple allergic reactions a year that result in hospital care and near brushes with death. This—her first autobiographical work—is her way of encouraging her daughter that she is not alone. We all have to face down death. So the memoir contains seventeen encounters from O’Farrell’s own life where she had near brushes with death.

To quote the author:
“There is nothing unique or special in a near-death experience. They are not rare; everyone, I would venture, has had them, at one time or another, perhaps without even realising it. The brush of a van too close to your bicycle, the tired medic who realises that a dosage ought to be checked one final time, the driver who has drunk too much and is reluctantly persuaded to relinquish the car keys, the train missed after sleeping through an alarm, the aeroplane not caught, the virus never inhaled, the assailant never encountered, the path not taken. 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. As Thomas Hardy writes of Tess Durbeyfield, “There was another date … that of her own death; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it?” If you are aware of these moments, they will alter you. You can try to forget them, to turn away from them, to shrug them off, but they will have infiltrated you, whether you like it or not. They will take up residence inside you and become part of who you are, like a heart stent or a pin that holds together a broken bone.”

It is compelling and sometimes disturbing to read because the author writes so beautifully that you empathize with her, and,, perhaps think of instances in your own life that were brushes with death too.

I can’t resist quoting one more section of the book to give you idea of its eloquence:

“After he had sailed around the Mediterranean in 1869, Mark Twain said that travel was “fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” Neuroscientists have been trying for years to pin down what it is about travel that alters us, how it effects mental change.

Neural pathways become ingrained, automatic, if they operate only by habit. They are highly attuned to alterations, to novelty. New sights, sounds, languages, tastes, smells stimulate different synapses in the brain, different message routes, different webs of connection, increasing our neuroplasticity. Our brains have evolved to notice differences in our environment: it’s how we’re alerted to predators, to potential danger. To be sensitive to change, then, is to ensure survival.”

This portion comes from a 2010 vinaigrette where she reminisces about her first school trip out of the country and segues into a near death experience that she and her seven year old son had where they almost drowned.

I highly recommend this thought-provoking memoir which is quite unlike any I have ever read before. Thank you Knopf and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book and for allowing me to review it.

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If the alliteration of the title doesn’t draw you right away towards Irish author Maggie O’Farrell’s most recent work, then perhaps the fact that I Am I Am I Am is O’Farrell’s testimony of the many face-offs she’s had with death throughout her life, will grab your attention. In total, she’s had seventeen of them.

As a fan of Maggie O’Farrell and having read her novels, This Must Be The Place, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox and My Lover’s Lover, I was naturally curious to read her long-awaited memoir. I expected a change in tone, perhaps a less graceful and poetic prose than the one O’Farrell is typically known for.

I was wrong.

The description of the first time O’Farrell came close to losing her life resonates loudly in the post-Weinstein era and the #MeToo movement. She was eighteen and working temporarily at a “holistic retreat,” where she performed a wide variety of jobs, restless to step away from an unexciting life back home.

O’Farrell recalls the day when she came close to losing her life in a way nothing short of ominous, a day that began busy and early, tending to guests, clearing breakfast tables, wiping down trays. Attempting to think back about why she made the decision to walk down a different path than the one she usually took on her daily explorations, O’Farrell says:

Why? I forget. Maybe I finished my tasks earlier that day, maybe the guests had been less untidy than usual and I’d got out of the guesthouse before time. Maybe the clear, sun-bright weather had lured me from my usual path.

Whatever the reason she had for straying from her usual routine that day, is not as important as the fact that O’Farrell’s choice puts her and a strange man in the same lonely path, surrounded by vast open landscape and nobody in sight. The first line in the book is nothing short of terrifying, a frightening association that most women know well: “On the path ahead, stepping out from behind a boulder a man appears.”

Nothing that O’Farrell writes next soothes our apprehension that something dreadful will happen:

I realise several things. That I passed him earlier, farther down the glen. We greeted each other, in the amiable yet brief manner of those on a country walk. That, on this remote stretch of path, there is no one near enough to hear me call. That he has been waiting for me: he has planned the whole thing carefully, meticulously, and I have walked into his trap.

O’Farrell did not die that day, which by no means signifies that she escaped unscathed. From that moment on, she describes sixteen other experiences that drew her close to death. A difficult labor followed by an almost fatal emergency C-Section, a near-drowning, a plane ride to Hong Kong gone horribly wrong, severe encephalitis when she was a child that left her with neurological damage which she still suffers to this day, a miscarriage, and almost being hit by a car. O’Farrell’s near death experiences certainly outnumber mine or those of anyone I know.

The chapters of O’Farrell’s memoir are named after parts of the human body, accompanied by simple clinical illustrations. Chapters such as “Neck”, “Whole Body”, “Lungs”, “Cerebellum” and “Bloodstream” are evidently related to a grave affectation of the named organ or limb. The only exception to this, is the last chapter titled “Daughter”, with a rightful illustration of the human heart, tying everything together in a memory of near tragedy but also of incredible blessings.

As we burrow through O’Farrell’s recollections of her near-fatal encounters, we can’t help but notice that her narrative is as poignant and powerful as it is in her novels. It isn’t easy to recount such impacting events in a way that resembles something like lyrical prose, but somehow O’Farrell manages to do just that. In describing her everyday struggle to keep her daughter (affected by severe allergies and a critical case of eczema) safe, she plucks at reader’s heartstrings with an impassioned affirmation:

You will want nothing more for your child, for all your children, than for them to live their lives unencumbered by worry, by discomfort, by the judgement of others. You will go to bed at night and breathe into the dark and think, one more day. I kept her alive for one more day.

I Am I Am I Am starts as a testimony of Maggie O’Farrell brushes with death, this is true. But it ends up being so much more than a recount of near fatalities. It is a recollection of everything that is life, all that shapes us, the good, the bad, the tragedies, and fortunes. O’Farrell reminds us that remembering how to live fully is so much more important than remembering how we almost ceased to exist.

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4.5 stars

Recounts of near death experiences makes you relive all the mishaps and brushes with death and disaster in your own life. Beautifully written.

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I had never read anything by Maggie before, but after hearing a few people liken it to Sylvia Plath I knew I needed to check it out, and I am glad I did. Such a personal recount of her life of childhood illnesses, and brushes with death, but written very much in her lyrical style. I enjoyed how honest and open she was. I will for sure be checking out some of her fiction titles.

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Maggie O'Farrell's <i>I Am, I Am, I Am</i> is a fantastic little memoir focusing out the author's "Seventeen brushes with death." Though the title might be a bit of a simplification, O'Farrell brings us into 17 of her ups and downs, her moments of the extraordinary and the mundane. Framing this collection as seventeen brushes with death forces us to think about the mortality of everyday life; where one simple change in routine, or stupid teenage dare, means the difference between life and death. The writing is excellent, and each story perfectly crafted. A great read.

I highly recommend this memoir, especially to folks who appreciate their memoirs a bit more on the literary side.

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We all have brushes with death, whether we know it or not, times where a different choice may have changed your life. For Maggie she knows of at least 17 of these brushes with death and in this memoir she goes through many of them.

This was such a touching book and I felt connected to the author in a way I don't usually do. All the stories were told in a way that made me feel like I was there and even though I know she made it through, it was stressful to read.

This book made me think about life, death, and everything in between

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“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.” – The Bell Jar

I am I am I am a memoir by Maggie O'Farrell could be entitled Alive Alive Alive. She has been encountering death at every turn and knows to appreciate life. The book is at once impossible to put down and impossibile to read in one sitting. Reading about so many close calls and perils takes one's breath away and is simply heartbreaking, but we remind ourselves that it ends well, she is writing about it after all. Maggie O'Farrell writes very well. I simply loved this book. I loved her love of life, her drive to travel, her unstoppable energy and her ability to overcome her limitations caused by an early devastating illness. This book accounts for many close calls some of which we might even recognize (I once swam across a lake without anybody spotting or supporting me) like getting out of the way of oncoming traffic which might be a common peril we all avoided at one time, but she does more than recounting of them all, she takes the reader inside her thought process and the emotions and we come really close to feeling with her. Reading I am I am I am is living vicariously at its best. I highly recommend this beautifully written memoir which will remind you to appreciate and savour life at every moment might even inspire you to write things down.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/art-matters-when-books-can-save-your-life_us_59a95ba2e4b0d0c16bb52451

✪ Maggie O’Reilly has eluded death more times than anyone you know. In I Am, I Am, I Am, the brilliant Irish novelist faces down medical catastrophes and multiple stranger-dangers, exploring her curious knack for escape as she persists in fully embracing each day she’s granted. A nuanced and compelling testament to the wonder of being alive.

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