I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

Compared to Maggie O'Farrell, my life is incredibly mundane.
After reading her book, I've never been more grateful.

In I Am, I Am, I Am (henceforth IAIAIA), O'Farrell describes seventeen occasions where she or those close to her have come close to dying. Nonfiction has a reputation for being dry and boring, but IAIAIA is anything but. And for a morbid subject matter, I found it surprisingly optimistic. Better yet, Maggie gets her “live in the moment” point across without being too corny.

Gender factors hugely into IAIAIA. Put simply, the reluctance and at times refusal to believe women...hurts and kills women. Being a woman in a patriarchal society makes it easy to get hurt, and difficult to have that hurt addressed.

O'Farrell appeals to different authorities—police officers, doctors—and time and again has trouble being taken seriously or even heard. She tries to advocate for herself, and often others as well: she worries about the man with the binocular strap targeting other women in the future, she worries about the health of her baby should she be denied the caesarean procedure her medical history requires. But she's shut down.

Luckily, Maggie has some amazing friends who find alternatives to those who could not help because they will not listen. We all need people who will jolt us out of resignation and insist that how we've been treated is unacceptable. The whole dynamic is a mix of infuriating and uplifting.

In all, I enjoyed IAIAIA more than I anticipated. And I know this is trivial, but the spine looks pretty on a shelf. I am, I am, I am glad I read I Am, I Am, I Am (I am, I am, I am kind of sorry about the bad pun but I am, I am, I am keeping it in and no one can stop me).