I Am I Am I Am

Review by Abeer Hoque

I Am I Am I Am is a memoir in essays by Maggie O’Farrell. Each chapter deals with a different “near death” experience from her life. The chapters are unevenly written with three brilliant pieces (the first, the last, and the one on miscarriages). The rest exhibit various degrees of annoyingness and rich white western privilege. Of course, the point isn’t that her life is more rife with danger than others (although she appears to have a penchant for putting herself into unnecessarily harrowing situations) but that everyone is one turn away from disaster.

O’Farrell’s genius is her drop-dead gorgeous language and incisive and mostly self-aware psychology. Just read this description of a house: “the gas lamps leaking deltas of rusty red effluvia down the crumbling plaster.” Many of her experiences deal with being a woman in the world, and I found myself almost breathless in recognition when reading. For example, the first chapter where as a young woman, she encounters an ominous man on a hiking trail, and I don’t think there’s a woman alive who hasn’t felt what O’Farrell describes with razor-sharp heart-stopping accuracy: “Did she make the mistake of alerting him to the monster he was?”

The miscarriage chapter was piercing as well, both for its frank discussion on what it means to have “ghost children we still carry in our minds” (what a shocking and true term “ghost children” is), and because the piece goes into the age-old practice of disbelieving women. I’ve never been a mother-to-be in a patriarchal misogynist healthcare system (aka the world), but I know what it’s like “to be so unheard, so disregarded, so disbelieved.”

Two friends read this book almost simultaneously with me. The first loved it; the second hated it. I get why the second friend found her dishonest or exaggerating, but I’m also going to take a woman’s word for it when she says no one listened, that things happened the way she said, because it feels true to the world I live in. But I also found it trying to read about O’Farrell’s blithe privilege of traveling the world in order to curb her restlessness, like this line describing said nights of ennui: “I might rearrange my collections of Scandanavian glass.” Ugh.

But then there are lines like this about kite flying: “If you erased the kites from the scene, these people would look like visionaries, fanatics, gazing into the sky, arms held up in appeal, in awe.” My second friend thought O’Farrell’s fiction might provide enough distance to work better for him. I enjoyed I Am I Am I Am, even if not wholly, and I’m pretty sure her fiction would knock it out of the park.

I Am I Am I Am
Maggie O’Farrell
Vintage
ISBN: 978-0525436058