I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O'Farrell

Genre: Biographies & Memoirs
Length: 304 pages
Audiobook Length: 5 hours and 54 minutes
First Published: 2018

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Publisher’s Description

We are never closer to life than when we brush up against the possibility of death.

I Am, I Am, I Am is Maggie O’Farrell’s astonishing memoir of the near-death experiences that have punctuated and defined her life. The childhood illness that left her bedridden for a year, which she was not expected to survive. A teenage yearning to escape that nearly ended in disaster. An encounter with a disturbed man on a remote path. And, most terrifying of all, an ongoing, daily struggle to protect her daughter–for whom this book was written–from a condition that leaves her unimaginably vulnerable to life’s myriad dangers.

Seventeen discrete encounters with Maggie at different ages, in different locations, reveal a whole life in a series of tense, visceral snapshots. In taut prose that vibrates with electricity and restrained emotion, O’Farrell captures the perils running just beneath the surface, and illuminates the preciousness, beauty, and mysteries of life itself.

Quotes from I Am, I Am, I Am

That the things in life which don’t go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do.

The people who teach us something retain a particularly vivid place in our memories.

I am desperate for change, endlessly seeking novelty, wherever I can find it.

We are, all of us, wandering about in a state of oblivion, borrowing our time, seizing our days, escaping our fates, slipping through loopholes, unaware of when the axe may fall.

When you’re a child, no one tells you that you are going to die. You have to work it out for yourself.