As well as making sense of the extraordinary, O’Farrell’s expertise lies in finding significance in the ordinary, making connections and finding clarity where most might find fog ... O’Farrell hopscotches across the decades, offering us a series of hugely evocative vignettes that point to multiple lives and identities. Thus, we meet her as a daughter, a student, an office worker, a mother, a wife and a traveller. We are privy to various moods and mindsets: in love, heartbroken, lonely, restless, rebellious, scared, purposeful. I Am, I Am, I Am isn’t purely about peril, it’s about the life lived either side of it. These snapshots, shared in extreme closeup, reveal a thoughtful and determined writer who, despite frequent trauma, remains resilient and unbowed.
As its title suggests, its pounding pulse is ultimately life-affirming. It's an extraordinary book, a reminder that while life has its limits and can be unpredictable, we should push against limitations and not give in to fear ... I Am, I Am, I Am is filled with lessons the rest of us would be wise to heed. Mortal threats are more common than we think, her book demonstrates, but you can't let them stop you from experiencing life to the fullest.
This awareness — of time, luck, fate and 'the feeling of having pulled my head, one more time, out of the noose' — drives O’Farrell’s story. She reminds us that we all live a hairbreadth from death ... I Am I Am I Am is at its strongest when she describes the intensity of her love and sense of responsibility for her own three children, and her fear of unwittingly putting them in harm’s way ... If I have a quibble with this book, it’s that there are a few spots where O’Farrell’s wise and lyrical voice veers toward the didactic, including footnotes and journalistic asides that distract from the deep emotional resonance. In the end, this memoir is a mystical howl, a thrumming, piercing reminder of how very closely we all exist alongside what could have happened, but didn’t.
If this sounds morbid or melodramatic, let me assure you it is not. Ms. O’Farrell turns these moments over so brilliantly, uncovering in the particulars of each those shining, universal experiences, that they are a pleasure to read. And, indeed, difficult to stop reading ... There are echoes of Virginia Woolf not just in the rhythm of the prose but also in its dreamlike immediacy. The effect, ingeniously, is of a life told through the gaps, those near misses, on the eluding of which the rest of life hangs.
The suspense...is tremendous, a vivid explication 'of how a situation can turn from benign to brutal in the blink of an eye, the space of a breath' ... the tensely pulled tendons of her fiction have prompted critics to focus on the way her novels mingle the thrilling nature of fear with the mystery of the unknown. The mastery is visible here, even when there is no mystery, just the magnification of a moment of terror ... O’Farrell’s book is a long and lyric pause on life’s aborted endings; there is no clichéd prescription to the ready-made gratitude of end-of-life memoirs here. O’Farrell offers instead an invitation to hover intellectually and emotionally on the precipice with her.
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 ... 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 ... 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.
O’Farrell’s intrepidness and determination are awe-inspiring, her experiences overwhelming, and her writing impeccable. This is a memoiristic tour de force.
...[a] riveting memoir ... Her stories are harrowing, but the purpose of these essays is not to frighten. It is to affirm. She did not die; she lived through all of these experiences and now recounts each one in vivid, fully alive detail.
Reading this memoir is like being taken further and further through the layers of a human life down to some mysterious core from which all meaning emanates. It shows us what it means to be vulnerably alive, to digest the seemingly indigestible fact of our mortality. This is a memoir to be cherished.
Throughout, the narrative is compelling and visceral; O’Farrell knows how to draw in readers. Perhaps the only downside to the book’s organization is that because the stories aren’t in chronological order, some of them feel repetitive, as the author occasionally provides redundant context about the events in her life. An intriguing and mostly engaging collection of life-threatening stories.
