Review of I AM I AM I AM: Seventeen Brushes with Death
or 17 ways Maggie O'Farrell of HAMNET fame almost died ... nifty stuff.
I did not seek out this book by the author of Hamnet. I rarely read books by the same writer back to back. When I do so, it is in response to how much I enjoyed the first book. Almost always, I find the second book deeply disappointing – which then puts a bit of a shadow on my initial infatuation. It does not mean I will not return to the writer, only that I need to give it time to allow the next book to grow in my mind without the immediate comparison of its highly respected sibling. It is a sibling thing – like spacing your children a couple years apart. The only exceptions are usually a writer with a formula that mades each book pretty similar – Raymond Chandler and similarly gifted detective writers are a case in point. The other exception is the sequel (e.g. Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life and God in Ruins) or the trilogy (e.g. Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell books or the neglected magnificence of Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga).
So … I did not intend to read this book. Hamnet was too good. While zooming, a friend showed me the very attractive cover of I Am I Am I Am, described the premise and told me that each “I Am” is the beating of our heart. L Now quite interested, I looked at it for a moment in a brief double masked pass through the local bookstore and was hooked. That might be all you need to know. The title is self-explanatory. The stories are real and serve as a novel way to structure a memoir. Maggie O’Farrell’s writing often captures the vivid immediacy that was the signature of Hamnet while her tempered but nonetheless outraged feminism is much more on display in this memoir than in her inventive novel. There are 17 stories here. They are all legit and it was only the length of the last two that I struggled with – not their content. In fact, the last two stories trigger a gentle replay response to everything you have just read. When I finished the book early one sleepless morning, I wrote down my list of “brushes with death”. I came up with 12 – all legit. I was very surprised. I realized what a great way to tell the story of one’s life. Oh well …
I AM I AM I AM: Seventeen Brushes with Death
by Maggie O’Farrell (2018)
285 pages