27/08/2026
📚✨ Looking for your next great read? The amazing staff at Rugby Library have curated some fantastic reading recommendations just for you! 📖
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Cheryl recommends I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O'Farrell
"I’ve read all of Maggie O’Farrell’s novels—I especially love The Marriage Portrait and Instructions for a Heatwave—but until now I knew very little about her life. This memoir has been sitting on my TBR pile since its publication in 2017, and I’ve finally got around to it. It’s wonderful.
The book recounts seventeen near-death experiences that have punctuated O’Farrell’s life, each told in a separate chapter. The narrative moves back and forth through time and place, creating a fragmented but compelling portrait of survival. Some of the incidents are terrifying ‘wrong place, wrong time’ moments, while others are more reflective accounts of what might have been.
As a young child, Maggie suffered from an illness she was not expected to survive, an experience that shaped both her childhood and her later life—fuelling a teenage desire to escape and an adult appetite for adventure. She writes about these events without sentimentality, which makes them all the more powerful.
The chapters describing her own prolonged hospital stay as a child, and later her experiences caring for her daughter, who suffers from severe eczema and complex allergies, are especially heart-breaking. The prose is as beautiful and precise as in her novels. Each chapter reads almost like a medical essay, concise, factual, and with much left unsaid.
I loved it—and I can’t help wondering what experiences she’s had since writing it."
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📖 Find this title on our catalogue at https://tinyurl.com/3zfnna4j
