I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death by Maggie O'FarrellMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is an interesting premise for a book. The opening Chapter was chilling and beautifully narrated. It was as clear as if I'd been there. Maggie O'Farrell is a very accomplished author, and really good at the aft of writing. As we lurched from one near-death experience to antother, some short some long, the variety of events was interesting. The time-line was a little difficult because, although the year was given at the beginning of each tale, I had to constantly try to remember how old she was. After a few Chapters, I was wondering whether there was a reason for putting them in the chosen sequence. I couldn't see any logical thread or flow, so they appear to come up randomly. So why not put them chronologically? Maybe it is to do with the intensity, with a high intensity experience at the beginning to draw you an, and very involved and exhaustive one at the end, so give you a sense of an ending. I think that was probably the rationale.
The problem with that sequence was that there were quite a few that were not as intense as the first and last. And as each brush with death followed from the previous, I became somewhat immune to the shock. Once the shock of being so close to death was dulled, the whole book became dull. Round about the eighth Chapter, I was thinking, here we go again. What kind of narrow escape from death this time? Frankly, half way into the book, I moved from feeling indifferent to sudden death to being really rather bored, as the tales, taken as a collection, do not go anywhere, as a whole. Each is a short story inits own right, with some strands recurring, but not in way that lends progress or continuity to the book.
I would have preferred to have put the book down after the first few Chapters, but I stuck at it because it was a Book CLub read. However, I cannot claim to have given much attention to the last half. It all got a bit too repetitive, especially the way that there was little learning or development from each incident. We can take our own lessons from these incidents, of course, but I wanted to know more about how she made sense of all of this and how each experience prepared her (or not) for the next. I do get a bit bored when life happens to characters in books as if they had no agency over their circumstances. And, despite her evident skills as an author, I found this memoir uninteresting and of little value.
All in all, this project was a lost opportunity. For me, it is just a catalogue of calamities with no redemption. I would not recommend it. The very best part for me was the title, being a quote from a Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar: "I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am." That was such a powerful thing to be reminded of.
