Editors Reads Verdict
I Am, I Am, I Am is a formally inventive memoir that uses the near-death experience as a structural principle for exploring a life. O'Farrell writes about the body — its fragility, its resilience, its proximity to catastrophe — with the same precision and emotional intelligence she brings to her fiction. It is one of the finest memoirs of the past decade.
What We Loved
- The formal conceit — seventeen chapters, each a separate brush with death — is used with genuine structural intelligence
- O'Farrell writes about the body and its vulnerability with extraordinary precision
- The non-chronological structure creates a cumulative portrait of a life that is more revealing than chronology would allow
Minor Drawbacks
- The episodic structure can create emotional distance between chapters — some readers find the accumulation numbing rather than intensifying
- The memoir withholds certain autobiographical context that readers of her fiction might expect
Key Takeaways
- → The body carries the memory of its own near-extinctions in ways the conscious mind may not fully process
- → Proximity to death clarifies what the living ordinarily manage to keep obscure
- → A life can be understood through its crises as well as, or better than, through its continuities
| Author | Maggie O'Farrell |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Knopf |
| Pages | 278 |
| Published | September 7, 2017 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Memoir, Creative Nonfiction, Literary Nonfiction |
The Body at the Edge
Maggie O’Farrell has come close to dying seventeen times. The opening chapter — a teenage encounter with a man on a remote path who is later identified as a serial killer — establishes the book’s register immediately: visceral, precise, written from inside the moment with a clarity that suggests long retrospective processing of something that could not be processed in real time.
Each of the seventeen chapters takes a different brush with death as its subject and its title: Neck. Lungs. Blood. The naming is deliberate — this is a book about the body, about what the body contains and what it is perpetually close to losing. The structure is not chronological; the chapters move back and forth across O’Farrell’s life, from childhood through to motherhood, assembling a portrait through crisis rather than continuity.
The Chapter on Her Daughter
The book’s most devastating section concerns O’Farrell’s daughter, who has a severe immune disorder that means ordinary childhood is a landscape of potentially fatal encounters. The chapter describes the daily management of this condition — the vigilance required, the toll it takes, the constant recalibration of ordinary life to accommodate extraordinary risk — with a specificity and emotional control that is genuinely remarkable.
This is not sentimentalised. O’Farrell does not write about her daughter’s condition as a test of parental love or a lesson in gratitude; she writes about it as the specific, demanding, exhausting reality it is, and the writing is the better for the refusal of easy comfort.
Form as Meaning
The formal choice — discrete chapters, each complete in itself, each concerned with a different near-death moment — means that the memoir never quite allows the reader to settle into the rhythm of a conventional life story. This is appropriate. What O’Farrell is documenting is not the steady progression of a life but the series of ruptures that interrupted it, and the form enacts that fragmentation at the level of reading experience.
Our rating: 4.6/5 — A formally inventive and viscerally precise memoir that is one of the finest examples of creative nonfiction in recent years — O’Farrell brings her novelist’s eye to her own life with remarkable honesty and craft.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death" about?
Seventeen chapters, each structured around a different near-death experience — from childhood illness to encounters with violent strangers to medical emergencies — that together form a fragmentary, non-chronological memoir of a life lived in proximity to death.
What are the key takeaways from "I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death"?
The body carries the memory of its own near-extinctions in ways the conscious mind may not fully process Proximity to death clarifies what the living ordinarily manage to keep obscure A life can be understood through its crises as well as, or better than, through its continuities
Is "I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death" worth reading?
I Am, I Am, I Am is a formally inventive memoir that uses the near-death experience as a structural principle for exploring a life. O'Farrell writes about the body — its fragility, its resilience, its proximity to catastrophe — with the same precision and emotional intelligence she brings to her fiction. It is one of the finest memoirs of the past decade.
Ready to Read I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death?
Check the current price on Amazon.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)Prices and availability are subject to change. See Amazon for current price.
Review last updated: