I Am, I Am, I Am

I Am, I Am, I Am is Maggie O'Farrell's 2018 memoir, the structural project that pre-dates Hamnet (2020, Women's Prize) and that opened a much larger readership for O'Farrell's prose. The structural premise is the title (from Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar) and the framing device — O'Farrell tells her own life across seventeen short essays, each organized around a different brush with death that she has had across her four-plus decades. The seventeen episodes range from a near-miss with what later turned out to be a serial killer when O'Farrell was eighteen and hiking alone in a rural Scottish glen, through a near-fatal childhood encephalitis at age eight, through an emergency caesarean in her thirties, through a near-fatal anaphylactic reaction at a restaurant, to the immune-system condition her daughter has lived with from infancy.

O'Farrell's structural method is the patient short-essay construction that lets her organize a non-chronological memoir around the seventeen episodes without the conventional memoir's reliance on a single chronological arc. The Childhood Encephalitis chapter at the structural center of the book (about the year-and-a-half O'Farrell spent in a Welsh children's hospital at eight years old with what doctors at the time thought was viral encephalitis but that long-term medical observation eventually identified as cerebellar damage from a different cause) is some of the strongest contemporary British literary memoir prose about a specific childhood medical crisis. The closing essay about O'Farrell's daughter and the experience of parenting a child with a life-threatening immune-system condition delivers the structural moral payoff the entire seventeen-episode arc has been preparing for.

Recommended as required contemporary British literary memoir reading, as the structural pre-Hamnet memoir, and for fans of Hamnet, The Marriage Portrait, and the broader O'Farrell catalog. Compare to Crying in H Mart (Michelle Zauner), Educated (Tara Westover), and contemporary British and American literary memoir. The Daisy Donovan audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.