I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death by Maggie O’Farrell, book review: A rich celebration of every breath O’Farrell’s taken

This memoir of her life is told through brushes with death, including lying gravely ill in hospital as a child, when doctors thought she would die of encephalitis

In Maggie O’Farrell’s third novel The Distance Between Us, an ill child lying in her hospital bed hears another infant in the corridor outside being chastised. “Be quiet,” says an adult voice. “There’s a little girl dying in there.” At first the child in the bed feels sorry for this dying girl; it’s only after the nurse by her side, “looking cross and strangely ashamed,” swiftly closes the room’s open door that she realises she’s the little girl being talked about. Read O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am – a memoir with a difference, one “told only through near-death experiences” – and you learn this scene didn’t spontaneously spring forth from her imagination, rather it’s a real childhood memory from the time O’Farrell herself lay gravely ill in her own hospital bed, dying – or so the doctors and nurses thoughts – of encephalitis.

“Nearly losing my life at the age of eight made me sanguine – perhaps to a fault – about death,” she explains. “I knew it would happen, at some point, and the idea didn’t scare me; its proximity felt instead almost familiar.” Hence her ingenious and original decision to organise the story of her life around brushes with death. It’s a structure many, no doubt, wouldn’t be able to pull off, but O’Farrell’s existence has seemingly been as crammed full with illness, accident and spine-tingling close calls as a character in a death-and-disaster-packed soap opera. Near-death experiences aren’t exactly rare though, she points out. “We are, all of us, wandering about in states of oblivion, borrowing our time, seizing our days, escaping our fates, slipping through loopholes, unaware of when the axe may fall.” What makes them significant, she argues, is our awareness of them, and O’Farrell’s clearly more tuned-in than most.

Encephalitis, amoebic dysentery, a botched labour, a run-in with a murderer on a remote hilltop path, robbed at machete-point while travelling in South America; there are some genuinely chilling stories here. So much so, in fact, a handful of the less dramatic chapters can’t help but pale into insignificance by comparison – if she’d leaned an inch further forward into the road the speeding truck would have decapitated her; if her feet hadn’t found solid ground at the precise moment they did she wouldn’t have had the strength to go on swimming – ending somewhat abruptly. On a couple of occasions this sense of incompleteness lingers. What was the result of her friend’s HIV test, the one with the “ochre-tinged skin, the cornflake-sized scab on his face that won’t heal,” whom O’Farrell ropes into going to the clinic with her after she discovers her boyfriend’s been cheating on her? What happened after the two men who violently try to break into O’Farrell’s car on an otherwise deserted French lane – author and her nine-week-old baby trapped and terrified inside – give up and wander off? This “string of moments” – at best “snatches of a life” – never promised to be a complete autobiography though. Collected here together, however, they’re a rich celebration of every breath O’Farrell’s taken.

‘I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death’ by Maggie O’Farrell is published by Tinder Press, £18.99