I Am, I Am, I Am

At eighteen, Maggie O’Farrell works at a remote holistic retreat in Scotland. During a solo hike, a man she had passed earlier ambushes her on an isolated mountain path. He puts his binocular strap around her neck under the guise of showing her some ducks. Recognizing the mortal danger, O’Farrell talks her way down the mountain by inventing a story that her boss is expecting her. A local policeman dismisses her report, but two weeks later, detectives visit the guesthouse. She identifies the man from a folder of photographs and intuits that he has murdered someone with the strap. She later reads in a newspaper that a 22-year-old tourist from New Zealand was raped and murdered on the same path, leaving O’Farrell with lasting trauma.

Two years earlier, at sixteen, O’Farrell is filled with restlessness and disgust for her waitressing job, where she endures sexual harassment. One night, she impulsively joins friends at a harbor and jumps from a high wall into the dark sea. Underwater, a neurological condition from a childhood illness impairs her sense of direction, and she begins to drown. A boy from the group, a champion swimmer who has a crush on her, dives in repeatedly and pulls her to the surface, saving her life.

O’Farrell recounts her childhood identity as an “escapologist” who constantly ran off. Around age four or five, while in a Welsh town with her father, she sees her mother and sisters across the street. Slipping her father’s hand, she runs into the road and into the path of an oncoming car. The car swerves and brakes just in time, its bumper grazing her thigh but leaving her unharmed.

At twenty-one, O’Farrell is on a plane to Hong Kong. She has abandoned her plans for a PhD after receiving disappointing exam results and is leaving behind a close friend from Cambridge to meet another man, Anton. Mid-flight, the plane suffers a catastrophic failure and plummets. In the chaos, O’Farrell feels a sense of numbed resignation, believing she is about to die. The plane eventually stabilizes and lands safely. In Hong Kong, she finds that her academic “failure” is a liberation. She begins reading voraciously and, one night, starts writing what will become her first novel.

Years later, O’Farrell and her partner, Will, are traveling in Chile. While walking by a lake, a man grabs her from behind and holds a machete to her throat, demanding money. Will initially hesitates, assessing whether he can overpower the attacker, but O’Farrell convinces him to hand over their cash. After taking their money, the man continues to hold her by the hair, and she fears he will drag her into the nearby forest. He suddenly lets her go and orders them to run. The incident prompts O’Farrell to tell Will for the first time about her 1990 encounter with the man on the mountain.

During her first pregnancy, O’Farrell’s medical history of neuromuscular damage from childhood encephalitis means specialists had advised a C-section. However, this is dismissed by an arrogant consultant, Mr. C, who refuses to schedule the procedure. After three days of non-progressing labor, an emergency C-section is performed. The baby is in a “star-gazer” position, which made a natural birth impossible. During the difficult delivery, O’Farrell suffers a major internal rupture and begins to hemorrhage. As the medical team panics, a man in beige scrubs who had been observing silently steps forward and takes her hand, grounding her. The surgical team saves her life.

During a routine scan for her second pregnancy, O’Farrell learns the fetus has died, a condition known as a “missed miscarriage.” She opts to go home and wait for the miscarriage to begin naturally, grappling with the grief and the strange state of carrying a baby that is no longer alive. A friend who is a doctor warns her of the risk of infection and insists she schedule a surgical procedure if it does not resolve soon.

While swimming in the Indian Ocean, O’Farrell is caught in a riptide. As she tries to swim parallel to the shore, a massive wave crashes over her, tumbling her violently and pulling her under. Disoriented and drowning, she is scraped along the seabed before the wave deposits her back in the shallows. She crawls ashore, bleeding but alive, realizing no one on the beach, including her husband, Will, noticed the event.

As a teenager at a music festival, O’Farrell is impulsively volunteered by a drunk friend for a knife-throwing act. She is buckled to a circular board in the center of a circus ring. The knife-thrower puts on a blindfold, relying on the sound of his assistant’s hammer tapping the board to aim his throws. The knives land perilously close to her body. Terrified, she endures the act and is released unharmed.

O’Farrell recounts a story told to her by her mother, as she has no memory of it. At age three, after being told to stay in the car, she gets out and stands directly behind her mother, who is about to slam the heavy boot of the car shut. Her head is in the direct path of the descending boot lid. Her mother spots her at the last second and pulls her out of the way, saving her from a severe head injury or death.

Later, O’Farrell is walking with a man she is falling in love with. A stray dog joins them. As they walk along a road, a large lorry approaches at high speed. O’Farrell instinctively bends down to secure the dog’s collar, moving her head into the lorry’s path. The vehicle passes so close that its wheel arch skims the top of her skull, missing her by a fraction of an inch.

While traveling overland through China with her partner, Anton, O’Farrell contracts a severe case of amoebic dysentery. In a hotel room, she becomes delirious with fever and dehydration, reaching a point where she is ready to give up and die. A French doctor also staying at the hotel recognizes the severity of her condition and insists she go to a hospital. Anton takes her to a chaotic local hospital where she is treated with a powerful antibiotic that saves her life.

In her mid-twenties, after discovering her long-term boyfriend’s serial infidelity, O’Farrell goes to a sexual health clinic for an HIV test. She brings her close friend, Eric, who she suspects is also at risk. While waiting, she confronts the possibility of a positive result.

O’Farrell is in a car on a deserted road in France with her nine-week-old son, struggling with the aftermath of his traumatic birth. Her husband, Will, has gone for a walk. Two menacing men emerge from a field and run towards the car. Realizing Will has the car keys with him, she frantically searches the unfamiliar rental car for the central lock button. She finds and presses the button an instant before the men reach the car. They are unable to open the locked doors and eventually leave.

In Zanzibar with her family, O’Farrell wades into the sea with her seven-year-old son on her back, heading for an offshore platform that she was told was a walkable distance. The seabed drops away, and she finds herself in deep water, forced to swim with her son clinging to her. Her muscles, weakened from her childhood illness, begin to fail. The weight of her son pushes her underwater, and they both begin to drown. As she goes under, her outstretched hand finds the bottom rung of the platform’s ladder, and she pulls them both to safety.

At age eight, O’Farrell contracts encephalitis, a viral inflammation of the brain. She is hospitalized and becomes progressively paralyzed, suffering from extreme pain. During her stay, she overhears a nurse in the hallway state that "a little girl is dying in there," and realizes the nurse is talking about her. She survives the acute illness but is left with permanent neurological damage to her cerebellum. The illness fundamentally alters her identity, leaving her with a reckless attitude toward life that only subsides when she becomes a mother.

The final chapter frames the entire memoir, focusing on the ongoing threat to her daughter, who suffers from a severe immunology disorder causing life-threatening anaphylaxis. The narrative cuts to the present: the family is lost in the Italian countryside when her daughter goes into anaphylactic shock. With no phone signal and her daughter’s condition worsening rapidly, they race through unfamiliar roads. The car’s satnav acquires a signal, directing them to a hospital eight minutes away. They speed toward it as O’Farrell holds her daughter, fighting to keep her alive. The memoir concludes with the affirmation of her daughter’s existence against this constant threat: "She is, she is, she is."