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

As someone who thinks about death more than is probably average or healthy, I couldn’t resist diving into Maggie O’Farrell’s unconventional memoir. Told in non-chronological order, each chapter is the story of a near-death experience and is dated and named for the body part—neck, lungs, abdomen, etc.—we see become compromised. With direct, self-aware prose, O’Farrell conveys the fragility of life without melodrama as she takes us through memories of her childhood illness and her reckless adolescence, into her present, where she’s mother to a child who has a life-threatening immunological condition. O’Farrell is a wonderful storyteller, and her writing manages to be both gorgeous and harrowing, haunting and inviting. Throughout this book, I found myself holding my breath and pressing my hand to my own bragging heart. Then, once I breathed a final sigh of relief at another near miss coming to pass, I started recommending this book to everyone.