You Are, You Are, You Are

Thinking about Life and Death with Maggie O'Farrell

The New York Times Book Review regularly includes an interview with a writer in its opening pages, and among questions like “What books are on your nightstand?” and “What books are you embarrassed not to have read?” is this one: “What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?” While I’m sure many have heard of the book I’ll discuss today—I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell, which topped the Sunday Times bestseller list in the U.K. in 2018—I’ve never met any of them, perhaps because the book didn’t make the same splash in the U.S. Whatever its actual popularity, O’Farrell’s memoir has always seemed to me to be one of those that flew under the radar in America, though for me it easily ranks among the best of the past decade.

I Am, I Am, I Am includes a tantalizing subtitle: Seventeen Brushes with Death. I happen to love reading about tragedy, loss, grief, and the like, so much so that my wife often shakes her head when another “death book,” as she calls them, arrives in the mail. I’m attracted to such books in part because they help me continue to sort through several early deaths—of family members, friends, and mentors—I confronted before I turned thirty, but also because when in the midst of mourning a loss we’re often highly attuned to the value of life, as if all the petty dust that normally clouds our vision has been wiped from our eyes. That each of O’Farrell’s chapters details a time when death came near means that her awareness of our living, breathing humanity is heightened, or at least that’s the effect her tales have on me.

There’s so much to admire about this memoir. I love how O’Farrell ignores chronology, dipping into various moments in her life just as memory leaps unpredictably to prior experience. I love how she depicts numerous episodes of near-death (from strangulation, drowning, childbirth, parasite, encephalitis, etc.) without the slightest hint of sentimentality. And I love how she returns not only to her own close calls with the end but also to moments when her husband or children were in danger. Indeed, the book concludes with a remarkable chapter about O’Farrell’s daughter, whose immunological disorder makes her intensely allergic to a long list of items that can send her into anaphylactic shock. I won’t spoil the final lines by quoting them, but the marginal comment I inscribed in my copy of the book—“Fucking beautiful!”—may give some indication of their power.

I’ll add that in the undergraduate course I teach on memoir, this book is often cited by my students at the end of the semester as their favorite. One reason may be O’Farrell’s deceptively simple prose style, coupled with a knack for quickly pulling us into her stories, like a magician who compels interest with their first gesture.

On the path ahead, stepping out from behind a boulder, a man appears.

--“Neck”

“It was nothing you did,” the nurse says. “It’s not your fault.”

--“Baby and Bloodstream”

I am in the shallows of the Indian Ocean, out beyond the breakers, my shoulders and head above the surface.

--"Lungs”

Just before the end of the summer holidays, I woke up early and the world looked different.

--“Cerebellum”

Who can’t anticipate trouble—trouble that soon arrives—upon reading any of these unadorned opening lines? By the end of the first paragraph, you’re hooked, and the pages turn quickly.

Yet as deft as a storyteller as O’Farrell clearly is, I suspect the real reason my students appreciate her memoir is that beneath all the distractions of social media, they may be starving for frank conversations about death—about how to live with its unpredictable yet inevitable arrival—which, they know, isn’t reserved for the elderly among us. By looking at near-misses with death, O’Farrell gets at vital truths we all know but often forget: that however far off it appears, death hovers right around the corner. That while it seems like something that happens to other people, it will also happen to us. That the very thing we set in opposition to life is precisely what makes it matter.