Weekend read

I Am, I Am, I Am: A Memoir, Maggie O’farrell, Tinder Press, $35

It’s perhaps fitting that the title of UK author Maggie O’farrell’s memoir is taken from a line by arch confessional poet Sylvia Plath: ‘‘I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.’’

There is something deeply confronting, revelatory and exposing about O’farrell’s new book, her eighth to date.

Its subtitle, ‘‘Seventeen Brushes with Death’’ is an early clue that this is far from a conventional memoir.

But, by bringing an honesty of her writing and complexity to the slant of her subject matter, O’farrell has composed a sequence of life stories in IAM,I Am, I Am which offers facility, rather than cataclysm, resonance rather than remoteness.

Farrell is the author of seven novels already, including the wonderfully dark Costa Novel Award-winning The Hand that First Held Mine.

So her talent for structuring story is obvious.

In IAM,IAM,IAM , this aptitude is transferred astutely from prose to memoir form. Rather than the conventional chronological structure one might expect of an autobiography, O’farrell opts for a non-linear narrative constructed around parts of the physique.

So while the book begins in 1990, moves backwards timewise to 1977, moves forwards to 1993 and so on, structurally it really shifts around the anatomy: ‘‘Neck’’ to ‘‘Lungs’’ to ‘‘Spine…’’ and so forth.

The body then, not its place in time, becomes the primary configuration in the narrative, permitting O’farrell to dissect the past according to corpus, not chronology.

In doing so, IAM,IAM,IAM solidifies as series of vignettes, each one perfectly formed and thematically interwoven with the one that follows.

Such organisation and focus is completed in each part of this narrative by beautiful writing.

The opener, ‘‘Neck’’, is so tight and richly worded it confounds its macabre topic. It is a tale of O’farrell’s unwitting interaction with a serial killer and thwarted attempts to raise the concerns of law enforcement. The story should read like an episode of Special Victims Unit, but instead, at this author’s hands, turns into a meditation upon innocence, intuition and institutional blunder.

The same acuity is brought to bear on each of the chapters here, most notably in the story of bungled childbirth, ‘‘Abdomen’’ and in the teenage high jinx tale, ‘‘Lungs’’. Always the prose is crisp, the examination of topic intense and deep.

With seven novels already under her belt thus far, Maggie O’farrell is an author of much renown and achievement, but she has never written better than in I Am, I Am, I Am.

– Siobhan Harvey