"I Am I Am I Am is a gripping and glorious investigation of death that leaves the reader feeling breathless, grateful, and fully alive. Maggie O’Farrell is a miracle in every sense. I will never forget this book."
—Ann Patchett
An extraordinary memoir—told entirely in near-death experiences—from one of Britain's best-selling novelists, for fans of Wild, When Breath Becomes Air, and The Year of Magical Thinking.
We are never closer to life than when we brush up against the possibility of death.
I Am, I Am, I Am is Maggie O'Farrell's astonishing memoir of the near-death experiences that have punctuated and defined her life. The childhood illness that left her bedridden for a year, which she was not expected to survive. A teenage yearning to escape that nearly ended in disaster. An encounter with a disturbed man on a remote path. And, most terrifying of all, an ongoing, daily struggle to protect her daughter--for whom this book was written--from a condition that leaves her unimaginably vulnerable to life's myriad dangers.
Seventeen discrete encounters with Maggie at different ages, in different locations, reveal a whole life in a series of tense, visceral snapshots. In taut prose that vibrates with electricity and restrained emotion, O'Farrell captures the perils running just beneath the surface, and illuminates the preciousness, beauty, and mysteries of life itself.
*Amazon.com Review*
I'll be honest: When I first started this book, I almost put it straight back down. The opening scene of the author's teenage encounter with a stranger on an isolated hiking trail made me want to look away from the page itself, unwilling to read farther…but O'Farrell's writing coaxed me on. And I'm so glad I continued. Because this is a book not about the life-or-death moments balanced on a knife's edge (sometimes literally) but about the keen awareness of being alive that goes hand-in-hand with terror. The smell of cinnamon, the sound of agitated elephants on a beach, the soft belly fur of newborn kittens, and O'Farrell's own restlessness that urges her to keep moving, keep exploring, keep pushing forward, embrace and enhance the bitter seeds of fear from which these events are born. As she relates her stories in a nonlinear fashion, glimpses of O'Farrell's biography snap into place like puzzle pieces. The end of the book brings no full picture, however, for hers is an existence still creating its own destiny. Readers who were moved by The Last Lecture or When Breath Comes Air will find similar moments of affirmation here by a writer who has chosen to embrace the calamities that come with a life lived with curiosity and passion. —Adrian Liang, Amazon Book Review
*Review*
“It takes a deft storyteller to alternate between charming and terrifying on the page but here it is, a set of linked stories that play with that most curious fact: that we experience life’s joys and losses in the context of a mortal vessel. I would follow Maggie Farrell anywhere, even to the edge of death seventeen times.”
—Kelly Corrigan, New York Times bestselling author of The Middle Place, Glitter and Glue and Tell Me More
"Heart-stopping... Genius... Maggie O'Farrell turned 17 near-death experiences into a literary masterwork "
—Entertainment Weekly
"With stunning language and inventiveness, Maggie O’Farrell unpacks these moments...so brilliantly, uncovering in the particulars of each those shining, universal experiences, that they are a pleasure to read. And, indeed, difficult to stop reading... There are echoes of Virginia Woolf not just in the rhythm of the prose but also in its dreamlike immediacy. The effect, ingeniously, is of a life told through the gaps, those near misses, on the eluding of which the rest of life hangs."
—The Wall Street Journal
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