REVIEWS: I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell

Never has the past been more present that in Maggie O’Farrell’s captivating memoir I Am, I Am, I Am. Time can erase the sense of immediacy, but from the opening I was engrossed, more than that. I felt a jolt of fear, I was apprehensive, and for a brief second I forgot that I was reading a memoir. Surely that first encounter with death was more at home in a thriller, or the opening of a dark crime novel, surely that sort of thing didn’t happen in real life. It’s not a spoiler to say that O’Farrell survives the ordeal, and the next and the next, but for that fraction of a second I wondered whether she would.