A review by emmabeckman
I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death by Maggie O'Farrell

5.0

Mmmm... yes... this was very good. I really like Maggie O'Farrell's writing style (and I definitely need to pick up more of her work). I liked how this was structured, with the bouncing through time and ending with the daughter. My only complaint (such as it is) is that the ocean is known to be disorienting for anyone when you're stuck in it, and I think the description of her disability and its relation to her visual perception may have been better placed in the section with the dog and the truck than where it was. But I also thought it was good that it was introduced early on, when the other one was placed much later in the collection.

This book has a lower average rating than I might have expected, and I wonder if it is at least in part because people feel like some of the brushes are either very light/distant or overblown/exaggerated. And personally, I feel like even if they were dramatized (which I don't think they were), I still really love how she wrote about them, so that I overall really enjoyed all of the essays, no matter how tangential they seemed.