Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!

Last week, I reviewed The Right Sort of Man by Allison Montclair, a mystery novel set shortly after World War II in London. Jeanie included her post about October reading because several of the books were set in England, including one by Ann Cleeves. Jane learned about the fascinating history of crime and punishment in Georgian and Regency England from the book Jane Austen and Crime by Susannah Fullerton.

Book: I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death by Maggie O’Farrell
Genre: Memoir
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 2017

Source: E-book borrowed from the library

Summary: Maggie O’Farrell, author of Hamnet and several other beloved books, has an unusual number of near-death experiences. As Ann Patchett writes in her introduction to the 2025 edition,

Most of us have experienced some version of this once or twice, but few who haven’t been to war will see it seventeen times, and I don’t think anyone save Maggie O’Farrell has written it down with such immediacy and precision.

She has encounters with men who intend violence, with dangerous conditions in sea water, and with a plummeting airplane. Of course, as evidenced by the book, she lives to tell the tale.

Thoughts: When I realized that I Am, I Am, I Am was written as a series of reflections and that they were not presented in chronological order, I expected that I would read them like vignettes — maybe one story each night for seventeen nights. But, it turned out that this book was a surprise page-turner and I finished it in just a few days.

The stories build on one another toward the final two. The penultimate piece describes Maggie O’Farrell’s experience with a serious childhood illness and the final one is about a terrifying experience with her daughter’s illness.

The prose, as one would expect from Maggie O’Farrell, is stunning — even the most devastating moments have a terrible beauty.

There are experiments in the writing that alter the reading experience. Many passages are written in the present tense, adding to the immediacy. Some moments are told in second person, the ‘you’ substituting for the conventional ‘I’ in a memoir, which leads to a disconcerting blend of author and reader, an expansion of an individual ordeal to general human experience.

Appeal: Read I Am, I Am, I Am when you’re in the mood for beautiful writing that grounds you in your own humanity. In spite of the topic, I Am, I Am, I Am left me with feelings of hope and resilience.