I will not be writing to you about the Irish author whose third book was released a few weeks ago. You know the one whose current book is the most reviewed of all time? I'm not being contrarian. Having read this author's previous two novels I am not interested in what is contained in the third. Instead, I'm writing this week about Maggie O'Farrell, born in Northern Ireland, and her 2018 memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death.
I was prompted to read this book when it showed up as a virtual book club pick by Greenlight Bookstore. It's happening Tuesday if you'd like to join. I'd just finished O'Farrell's Hamnet which ranks among my favorite novels, mostly because it achieves that magic of conjuring a world from the page into my imagination. A rare feat for even a scene or two in most books, but O'Farrell keeps it up page after page. So I had to know who this master of fiction was and she was willing to tell me in seventeen discreet stories, all organized around various incidents regarding her brushes with death. Each essay is titled with a date to orient us to her age and station in life and a body part to focus our attention on what part of her body had endured various traumas or threats.
In a story in which she nearly drowned in the Indian Ocean she writes, "I realise I am going through one of those moments I have had all my life. It has all the shock and surreality of deja vu without the hint of foresight. It's as if I am suddenly missing several layers of skin, as if the world is closer and more tangible than ever before. Everything is presenting itself in coulours at a volume so vibrant, so lurid, it as if the dial has been turned up." Who hasn't felt the aftermath of adrenaline forcing your senses to open up after a near-miss of an oncoming bus in the crosswalk or a crash coming from another room in the middle of the night? It is lurid alright, all those colors at once. We also possess the ability to vibrate with life.
In Hamnet, O'Farrell made the heartbreak and sadness of losing a child in a plague vivid and, reading this memoir, I don't doubt she could have done so even if we were not living in another plague when it was published. In her memoir, she struggles to hold onto to her body after nearly dying of a virus in childhood, or the body of her dead child, or the body of her dying child who survives, with her knowledge that everything dies. The closing essay recounts her daughter's near-death experiences with anaphylaxis. She struggles, in big-hearted revelatory prose, with the push-pull of embodiment and surrender just as I do in living my life. It is no surprise she pulled off the level of veracity in Hamnet after reading how close to the bone she gets writing from her own experiences with death and loss.
Of the permanent neurological damage caused by a virus when she was eight, O'Farrell writes, "Coming so close to death as a young child, only to resurface again into life, imbued in me for a long time a brand of recklessness...it was not so much that I didn't value my existence but more that I had an insatiable desire to push myself to embrace all that it could offer." For me this is the central question of humanity: how do we make the most of life, driven by our desires and fears, without pushing it to the point of ruinousness? One tool, gleaned from years of daily practice, and from which the title of this blog derives, is my meditation practice which teaches a middle path between attachment and avoidance. Knowing the conditions of life as we find it is the steadiest ground we can hope for. Maggie O'Farrell examines hers with compassion and beauty.
The title of the memoir, "I am I am I am" is a line in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, a novel that heavily uses illness to signal when situations are no longer tenable. At its center, its characters cannot survive their conditions and are forced to change themselves or their situations. There are countless examples pointing to the impossibility of life. There are too many things that can and do go wrong.
Yet, here we are.