JESS JUST READS

A BOOK REVIEW BLOG

I Am I Am I Am by Maggie O’Farrell

An electric and shocking memoir of the near-death experiences that have punctuated Maggie’s life. The childhood illness she was not expected to survive. A teenage yearning to escape that nearly ended in disaster. A terrifying encounter on a remote path. A mismanaged labour in an understaffed hospital.

This is a memoir with a difference: seventeen encounters with Maggie at different ages, in different locations, reveal to us a whole life in a series of tense, visceral snapshots. Spare, elegant and utterly candid, it is a book to make you question yourself.

I Am I Am I Am is as shocking as it is inviting. Maggie O’Farrell documents these near-death experiences with what feels like third person narration, separating herself from them so she can accurately describe the events and how they unfolded, whilst also being able to remember and articulate exactly how she felt at the time and how it then affected her life afterwards.

This memoir is intimate, and whilst it is compact enough to read in one sitting, the reader walks away from it feeling like they’ve been punched.

Maggie opens the book with a chapter about her narrow escape from a rapist and murderer:

“On the path ahead, stepping out from behind a boulder, a man appears…I passed him earlier, further down the glen. We greeted each other…he has been waiting for me: he has planned this whole thing, carefully, meticulously, and I have walked into his trap.”

It almost seems fictional, how some of these near-death experiences unfolded — Maggie and her husband are overseas travelling when an armed robber holds a machete to her throat and demands they give him all of their cash. It’s heart-wrenching, but it’s also enticing. You’re sucked into the stories.

Each chapter tells of a different story, and the timeline moves around from the 1980s to the 1990s and then early into the 2000s — the timeline does not move chronologically. Her husband and children weave in and out of the memoir, but Maggie remains the central focus. We are intrigued by her life and determined to read as much as she will give us.

I Am I Am I Am allows the reader to confront their own vulnerability; we become determined to make our lives count. I finished some of these chapters and thought ‘what would I do in this situation? Would I be able to survive it?’

In one particular chapter, Maggie is sitting inside her car with her baby, breastfeeding. They’re parked on the side of a deserted highway and her husband has walked over the hill to watch the waves roll in. Maggie, alone with her child, sees two strange men approaching the car:

“…the men have seen my panic, see my problem, and now they are running and I have no idea what they want — money, car, baby, woman — but I don’t want to find out, I don’t need to know the answer to that question because maybe they don’t even know themselves. Maybe they’re just ready to react and exploit whatever they’ll find here.”

Amidst all of these true stories, Maggie has found a way to embed what she’s learnt into the book. She confronts what she’s gone through and how it affected her, and she often reminisces about these experiences with maturity.

“You do walk out. The nurse tries to stop you but you don’t listen. You’ve been through this enough times to be fully aware of ‘what happens next’. As you take the stairs down, away from the scanning department, you feel the notion, the idea of the child leaving you with each step.”

There’s a nice connection between her childhood and then her experiences as a mother raising her own daughter. Maggie grew up with a rare illness, and her daughter has grown up with severe allergies. As a result, a lot of Maggie’s learnings as a child have helped her parent her daughter.

I can’t fault this book. It draws you in and you find yourself holding your breath almost the entire way through. You know Maggie has survived everything, because she’s written this book, but you are desperate to find out how these events have unfolded. And how she’s escaped them.

Thank you to the publisher for sending me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

I am I am I am
Maggie O’Farrell
September 2017
Hachette Book Publishers

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Born A Crime
Trevor Noah
December 2016
Hachette Publishers Australia

Trevor Noah is the host of The Daily Show in the United States and has just published his memoir Born a Crime, documenting his life in South Africa under apartheid and then the country’s entry into a post-apartheid era in the 1990s.

The title of the book comes from the illegality of his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. As a result, Trevor was kept indoors for the early years of his life, his mother going to extreme efforts to hide him from a government that could steal him away. Eventually, South Africa was liberated of the tyrannical white rule and Trevor and his mother lived openly and freely.

“The only time I could be with my father was indoors…if we left the house, he’d have to walk across the street from us.”

Born a Crime is comprised of eighteen personal essay chapters, each prefaced by a short piece explaining an element of the apartheid in South Africa. Most of the chapters focus on Trevor’s relationship with his mother, who is smart, bold, brash and did the best job she could raising him and keeping him safe from harm.

“We waited and waited for a minibus to come by. Under apartheid the government provided no public transportation for blacks, but white people still needed us to show up to mop their floors and clean their bathrooms.”

Trevor’s memoir is compelling and inspiring but also comical and entertaining. He reflects on his caterpillar dinners and that time he was thrown from a moving car during an attempted kidnapping. He also spent a week in jail because he didn’t want his mother to know what he’d done. Trevor had a lively childhood and many chapters will make the reader laugh. By high school, he had become entrepreneurial, copying and selling pirated CDs to classmates and also standing in line at the cafeteria and to make a profit from students’ orders.

There is also a darkness to Born a Crime. When he was an adolescent, his mother married an auto mechanic Abel, whose Tsonga name Ngisaveni translates to ‘Be Afraid’. At times, he is caring and compassionate, but other times he is highly controlling and violent. Trevor and his mother became the victims of domestic violence and no matter how hard Trevor tried to convince his mother to leave, she always came back, fearful of what Abel would do to the family. Additionally, every time she went to the police with her complaints, the police would laugh it off as silly marriage issues and wouldn’t charge Abel.

In the end, Abel shot Trevor’s mother in the back of the head in a fit of rage. She survived, miraculously, but Abel was not charged. Even though Abel and Trevor’s mother are now divorced, even now after all these years he lives a few streets away from her. Born a Crime is as much a story about Trevor’s mother as it is about Trevor. She’s a courageous, resilient woman who worked hard to give Trevor the life that he deserved and to give him the skills to succeed in life.

I really enjoyed reading Born a Crime. It’s well-written and reflective, but also fast-paced and heartbreaking. It not only tells the story of Trevor’s childhood, but it highlights his mother and her role in his life. The book exposes the absurd and damaging apartheid and the historical significance of its liberation. Born a Crime was a great read and I have a whole new level of respect for Trevor (and his mum!) after having read the memoir.

Thank you to Hachette for sending me a review copy of this title in exchange for an honest review.

Not My Father’s Son: A Family Memoir by Alan Cumming

A beloved star of stage, television, and film, Alan Cumming is a successful artist whose diversity and fearlessness is unparalleled. His success masks a painful childhood growing up under the heavy rule of an emotionally and physically abusive father—a relationship that tormented him long into adulthood.

With ribald humor, wit, and incredible insight, Alan seamlessly moves back and forth in time, integrating stories from his childhood in Scotland and his experiences today as a film, television, and theater star. At times suspenseful, deeply moving, and wickedly funny, Not My Father’s Son will make readers laugh even as it breaks their hearts.

This is a very unique memoir because it is anchored by Alan’s father. This memoir is not about his fame or his filmography or his aspirations. This memoir is about how Alan’s father shaped who he became as an adult, and how his father greatly affected him throughout his entire life. Usually, celebrity memoirs are very much ‘this is what I did when I was 6, and this is what I did when I was 13, and when I was 17, this happened, etc etc’, and although it’s fascinating if you’re a fan, there’s no core theme. There’s no anchor. There’s no angle.The anchor/angle in Alan Cumming’s memoir is his physically and mentally abusive father.

There seem to be a few parallel storylines in this memoir. Alan uses flashbacks to tell stories about how his father would physically abuse him and torment him and make him feel worthless and useless. Alan’s father seems psychotic and perhaps mentally ill. These flashbacks are heartbreaking to read, but they also make you respect Alan Cumming even more than you already did, because he grew up and he worked really hard to understand his childhood and understand his non-existent relationship with his father.

The other storyline in the book is Alan in around 2010, when he was asked to be on the show Who do you think you are? Alan agrees, and this opens up a family mystery involving his grandfather, who died under suspicious circumstances in the early 1950s. Throughout the memoir, Alan, with the help of the show, finds out what happened to his grandfather almost 50 years earlier.

Another part of Alan’s life that is explored in this memoir is his relationship with his father in the present (around 2010-2011, when Alan started writing the memoir). His father continues to mentally torment Alan, almost unknowingly. Alan finds out that his father is not his real father, and that his mother had an affair. This parallels the flashback chapters where Alan talks about all the affairs his father had while his parents were still married.

Alan’s childhood seemed tragic. Despite having a loving relationship with his mother and his brother, he lived in fear because of his father’s abuse. He was made to feel useless and his father always set him impossible tasks and then yelled at him when he couldn’t complete them. Alan’s traumatic childhood greatly affected him later in life, but as the reader can sense upon completing the memoir, Alan does the best he can to live his life without the shadow of his father looming over him.

This is a great memoir, and readers who don’t usually read non-fiction will love it. I also recommend this memoir to people who are a fan of Alan Cumming. Although he doesn’t mention his acting and his movie experiences in this memoir as much as I would’ve wanted, it is still interesting reading about this other side to him that I assume very few people in his life were aware of.

My Score: 8/10

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