I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death

2017 | Biography

I Am, I Am, I Am is Sunday Times bestseller and Costa Novel-Award winner Maggie O'Farrell's electric and shocking memoir of the near death experiences that have punctuated her life.

When Maggie O'Farrell's daughter was diagnosed with a severe immunology disorder, she found herself writing stories to make sense of how closely with live alongside the possibility of death and the reality of pain. She began to look back at her own life, her own near-fatal illness as a child and the moments through her life where she was forced to look her own mortality in the face.

A childhood illness she was not expected to survive. A teenage yearning to escape that nearly ended in disaster. A terrifying encounter on a remote path. A mismanaged labour in an understaffed hospital. This is a memoir with a difference: seventeen encounters with Maggie at different ages, in different locations, reveal to us a whole life in a series of tense, visceral snapshots.

It is a book to make you question yourself: what would you do if your life was in danger? How would you react? And what would you stand to lose? I am, I am, I am is a book you will finish newly conscious of your own vulnerability, and determined to make every heartbeat count.

A heartfelt and tenaciously powerful condensation of what it means to be alive, this book will appeal to readers of Cheryl Strayed's Wild or Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking.

Waterstones has been a keen early advocate of Maggie O’Farrell since we identified her as a talent to watch in our 25 Authors of the Future list back in 2007 after supporting her brilliant debut After You’d Gone. Since then she’s continued to impress with novels including: Instructions for a Heatwave, The Hand That First Held Mine (for which she won the Costa Book Award) and This Must Be the Place.

Maggie O’Farrell (Author)