I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell
What a story this book is. Maggie O’Farrell’s storytelling prowess is extraordinary!
For 13 years I have almost exclusively reviewed books about personal and business leadership transformation, and now it is time to highlight a book that reminds us what truly great storytelling looks, sounds and feels like.
Two of my greatest mentors, Dr John Demartini and Tony Robbins, are prolific storytellers. 20 years of working with great leaders has taught me that they are often also, great storytellers. Interestingly, the same is true of great spiritual teachers and of great marketeers. On the back of completing three months of book reviews of marketing genius Russell Brunson’s trilogy, in each book Brunson highlights how profoundly important storytelling is. Brunson is a genius marketer who is also a great storyteller and wordsmith, his books and his on-line marketing messages are packed with well-crafted gripping stories about every-day life and feelings.
Maggie O’Farrell is, in my humble opinion, “in a league of her own” when it comes to engaging storytelling and wordsmithing that breathes realism, beauty and connection into her stories.Reading this book has inspired me to use more colourful, descriptive and compelling language in my own stories. Her writing makes the humdrum of everyday life seem profoundly interesting, and of course there is also plenty of drama along the way, as she disarmingly, self-critically and sometimes humorously describes her “ordinary life” and 17 brushes with her own mortality.
I Am, I Am, I Am is an autobiographical story that pulls you into O’Farrell’s world and her unique way of seeing it. The title first grabbed my attention, as it has ancient spiritual origins across various scriptures, ranging in context from “becoming more aware of who you authentically are” to “being more aware of your own mortality.”
To give you the fullest sense of the book’s depth and profundity, I will share one of many passages that demonstrates the author’s brilliant, creative, poetic and alive wordsmithing, and how it is so clearly rooted in her authentic experiences of mortality.
Many of the stories in this book involve actual close brushes with death. The one I will share here is not a brush with death, but rather an awareness of our own physical mortality. It resonated deeply with me, because I had a different but similarly profound moment of raised awareness when I was only six years old, one I knew immediately was the most significant experience I was ever likely to have. In the same way, Maggie O’Farrell, as a young girl, had that same awareness too. Just read the following extract to understand what I mean:
“I was outside the local shop, one hand circling the wooden door handle, swinging back and forth, letting my free, mittened hand meet the other and fall away; with each swing the elastic stretched between the mittens tugged and pulled on my back. I must have been waiting for my mother, who would have been inside buying groceries. This was the mid-1970s, a time when leaving small children on pavements outside shops was perfectly acceptable.
I remember that as I swung back and forth, something shifted or settled upon me, some extra depth of vision, a sudden recalibration or bifurcation of my perceptions. I could see myself both from above and from within. I had a sense of myself as minuscule, inconsequential, a tiny moving automaton in a wide scene, and at the same time I was acutely aware of myself as an organism, a human microcosm.
I could feel the interlocking stitches of my mittens pressing into my fingers as they clutched that door handle. I could feel the grain of the wood beneath the endlessly repeating stitches. I heard the crackle of my hair against the inside of my hat; could feel cold entering me, tunnelling into my body, and I could see it leaving me in a visible stream. I acquired a simultaneous sense of time as a vast continuum and an awareness that my stretch of it would be short, insignificant. I knew in that moment, and perhaps for the first time, that I would one day die, that at some point there would be nothing left of me: my mittens, my breathing, my curls. I felt that conviction for the first time. My death felt like a person standing there next to me.”
If this short passage from the book ‘grabs you’ and ‘makes you feel a little more alive’, as it did for me, then I would suggest you go and grab yourself a copy.