BOOK REVIEW
I am, I am, I am (Seventeen brushes with death)
By Maggie O’Farrell.
Published by Tinder Press, 2017. Hardback, 292 pp. ISBN 9781472240743
Imagine racing along unknown country lanes in Italy with your daughter’s life in danger and desperately seeking a hospital. She is showing the signs of anaphylaxis (a condition first discovered in 1901). The satnav comes to the rescue and help is not far off. The help and support in the UK given to Maggie O’Farrell’s daughter has meant that a donation from the proceeds of her book have been given to the Anaphylaxis Campaign.
This is just one of seventeen near death experiences described by the author in her memoir.At eighteen, Maggie describes an encounter with someone who put a binocular strap around her neck for other motives apart from bird watching. Falling into water and fighting for breath, narrowly avoiding death on a road somewhere in South Wales, experiencing air turbulence in a plane full on nuns and priests, and a touch and go caesarean in an understaffed hospital are just a few others that take place over a forty-two-year period of her life.
From one roller coaster to another, she describes aspects of public health which have impacted on her life. Fighting amoeba picked up from a Buddhist mountain in China only to be treated with equine drugs, anxious waiting for the results of a blood test in her twenties, and a baby with gastro-oesophageal reflux, ataxia as a child. Cats are said to have nine lives, but how O’Farrell overcame seventeen catastrophic events in her life is more than food for thought. How often do we really stand up to our mortality and face it full on?
The fly-cover describes the memoir as “…a series of tense, visceral snapshots. Spare, elegant and utterly candid…”. The descriptions of her brushes with death will leave the reader thinking about how they would cope if in danger. Do any us of really know how we would react? Oxford Dictionaries (online) define vulnerability as “exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally.” Maggie O’Farrell has had more than her fair share of close encounter compared to many. Two quotes from reviewers in the press wholeheartedly sum up the book as “Grips the heart” (The Sunday times) and “Technically dazzling and deeply moving” (Observer).
Euan MacAuslan
QTLS, FRSPH, MIFST, MCIEH
Senior Training Advisor
The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea