What didn’t kill me
A novelist’s memoir recounts a risky life of close calls.
The extraordinarily unlucky – and resilient – novelist Maggie O’Farrell organises her memoir around her brushes with death, of which there are many.
Death by knife or machete, death by a car’s boot slamming down like a guillotine; how would you like it? Chapter by chapter, O’Farrell puts 17 options on the table.
She starts by scaring the bejesus out of every woman reading: a lonely hilltop, a man stepping out in ambush and looping a binocular strap about her neck. Instincts zinging, she talks her way out of it, then almost never speaks of the near-miss again.
Bad men feature elsewhere, too. In what I found the most harrowing story, O’Farrell and her husband are driving along a deserted road at night when they pull over so she can breastfeed their new baby. Inexplicably, hubby goes for a wander. Two vagabonds emerge from a maize field and make for the car – a rental that she’s unfamiliar with – as she scrabbles to lock the doors.
Other stories involve water. As a teen, she leaps off a wharf into a heaving sea at night; as a mother lulled by a fancy holiday, she swims with her toddler on her back towards a pontoon that’s too far away.
O’Farrell’s interrogation of her memory is clear and urgent.
The reader is right there beside her – drowning, flailing, begging, dying – but at the same time kicking her for getting into these dangerous, often foreseeable situations.
The author has an intriguing excuse. A childhood bout of encephalitis damaged her cerebellum, the part of the brain that oversees motor control and aspects of cognitive function. She writes that coming so close to death as a child “imbued in me for a long time a brand of recklessness, a cavalier or even crazed attitude to risk”.
One can’t help wondering whether the encephalitis also played a more direct role: long-term effects of cerebellar damage, she acknowledges, can include impulsiveness, disinhibition, illogical thought and a deregulated sense of fear.
Does it matter? To the reader, not really. This is a book both intellectual and primal; galling and invigorating. It was a helpmeet to me: I read it and wept with my old cat, my shadow, quietly dying on the duvet beside me. I AM, I AM, I AM, by Maggie O’Farrell (Hachette, $35)