I Am, I Am, I Am

In this astonishing memoir, the New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait and Hamnet shares the seventeen 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 from a condition that leaves her unimaginably vulnerable to life's myriad dangers.

Here, O'Farrell stiches together these discrete encounters to tell the story of her entire life. In taut prose that vibrates with electricity and restrained emotion, she captures the perils running just beneath the surface, and illuminates the preciousness, beauty, and mysteries of life itself.

"[A] gloriously unconventional memoir. Maggie O'Farrell deconstructs our relationship to death by recounting the many times she's neared it." — Southern Living

"Transfixing...A mystical howl, a thrumming, piercing reminder of how very closely we all exist alongside what could have happened, but didn't." — The New York Times Book Review

"Striking and unexpected." — Kirkus Reviews

MAGGIE O'FARRELL was born in Northern Ireland in 1972. Her novels include Hamnet (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award), After You'd Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine (winner of the Costa Novel Award), and Instructions for a Heatwave. She has also written a memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. She lives in Edinburgh.