Close calls
“I knew, in that moment, and perhaps for the first time, that I would one day die, that at some point there would be nothing left of me, my mittens, my breathing, my curls, my hat,” Maggie O’Farrell writes in her memoir, “I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death.” It is not, in fact, the first time that she has come close to dying, or even the second or third. But she has been pulled under by a riptide in the Indian Ocean and we are right there with her as she learns, again and anew, about what it is to die and be alive.
O’Farrell, an Irish author who’s written seven novels, has structured her first work of nonfiction around 17 neardeath (or at least, death-adjacent) experiences. The chapters are organized by body part — lungs, circulatory system, abdomen, neck, etc. Some of the experiences she describes are common enough, part of the daily hazard of living. They might have happened to me or you. Once, O’Farrell got so close to a truck that she felt “metal at a considerable velocity just passing over skull.” When she was a child, her mother nearly slammed the door of the car trunk on her head but didn’t.
Other experiences are unusual; it’s clear that O’Farrell’s life has taken more turns than most toward death. She writes movingly of a neurological illness in childhood that left her temporarily in a wheelchair, of overhearing doctors discussing her imminent death. Her plane nearly went down over the ocean, once. And in the first anecdote, perhaps the most arresting, she describes being nearly strangled by a stranger. The threat of violence is quiet, almost imperceptible; she’s on a hike, and a strange man simply slips the string of his binoculars around her neck and says something about showing her a flock of eider ducks. Still, she writes, “I knew what came next. I could smell it, I could almost see it there, thickening and glittering in the air between us.”
Taken together, these vignettes make up a sharply intimate portrait of what it is to be a person in a body — and in particular, a female body. Though her gender is often implicit in her telling, she is harassed, threatened and nearly killed at least in part because of it. Her own body fails her, too. The chapter “Baby and Bloodstream” describes her multiple miscarriages. She insists, to a male doctor, that she needs the body of her unborn child. He insists that she does not. Moments like these are both hard to read and hard to turn away from. Her voice is authoritative, quietly demanding that we listen and look.
“I Am, I Am, I Am” isn’t a roller coaster, exactly; it’s more like a long train ride through the mountains, with crystallized moments at great heights and long drops. This dramatic momentum is a surprising, perhaps, given that we know what happens; the fact of words on the page are evidence that she always lives. O’Farrell brings a fiction writer’s sense of pacing to her own life. She knows how to moderate drama with finesse. She moves effectively into the second and third person at times, alternately drawing the reader close to her bodily experience and disembodying it.
The book has its pitfalls. O’Farrell sometimes strays into too much exposition, and occasionally the cliche. In one chapter, she wishes she could tell her 22-year-old self, “You need to expect the unexpected, to embrace it. The best way, I am about to discover, is not the easy way.” This may be true, but we’ve heard it before. The impulse to advise makes sense, as she reacquaints herself with younger selves. Also, perhaps, she wants there to be a point to all the nearly dying. There is, and we learn what it is, but it’s better left unsaid.
For the most part, the structure works: The vignettes stand alone and also weave a partial picture of her life. We see her grow up, go to university, move to Hong Kong, move back, fall in love, marry, have children. It’s refreshing not to learn these things in order. At times, though, the lack of continuity can be jarring. A major character vanishes and we wonder, what became of him? It can also be repetitive: We know that she has experienced a childhood illness long before we get to that chapter. Perhaps with a bit more editing, these wrinkles would have been smoothed.
Reading the book was a bit like peering through a lighted window into someone else’s living room. It’s rare to get a look so closely at a person’s brushes with mortality, and rarer still for that portrait to be so elegant. After all, mortality is a subject that often leaves people searching for words. O’Farrell finds good ones.
In the final chapter, she describes her young daughter’s illness and near-death experiences, and we fully understand why she was compelled to write her story this way. That final chapter, like the book, is heartbreaking, life-affirming, beautiful.
Throughout, we come to understand the title better. “I am, I am, I am” is borrowed from “The Bell Jar,” by Sylvia Plath. It is an incantation of sorts, and also an incredible insistence: Despite all odds, I am, she is, you are.