Main content
This programme will be available shortly after broadcast

As a young woman, Maggie O’Farrell met a man on a mountain path. Memoir based on near-death moments. Read by Hattie Morahan.

A memoir with a difference, subtitled: "Seventeen Brushes With Death".

Award-winning novelist Maggie O'Farrell tells her life through a series of vignettes of her near-death experiences -- including a childhood illness she was not expected to survive; a terrifying encounter on a remote mountain path; a mismanaged labour in an understaffed hospital.

The book started out as a private project, a way for O'Farrell to help her young daughter who suffers from a serious immunology disorder, including severe eczema and allergies that can cause anaphylactic shock:

"I've asked myself, when she has been very ill, how do you carry on when death is a daily possibility?"

Read by Hattie Morahan

Maggie O'Farrell's novels include "Hamnet" "After You'd Gone", "My Lover's Lover", "The Distance Between Us", which won a Somerset Maugham Award, "The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox", "The Hand That First Held Mine", "Instructions for the Heatwave", and "This Must Be The Place".

Abridged and produced by Kirsteen Cameron

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in August 2017.

14 minutes

On radio

Mon 20 Apr 202608:30
BBC Radio 4 Extra

More episodes

Previous

You are at the first episode

Next

2. Cerebellum

See all episodes from I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O'Farrell

Credits

ReaderHattie Morahan
AuthorMaggie O'Farrell
AbridgerKirsteen Cameron
ProducerKirsteen Cameron

Broadcasts

  • Mon 21 Aug 201709:45
    BBC Radio 4 FM
  • Tue 22 Aug 201700:30
    BBC Radio 4
  • Mon 4 Jul 202214:00
    BBC Radio 4 Extra
  • Tue 5 Jul 202202:00
    BBC Radio 4 Extra
  • Mon 20 Apr 202608:30
    BBC Radio 4 Extra
  • Mon 20 Apr 202613:30
    BBC Radio 4 Extra
  • Mon 20 Apr 202619:30
    BBC Radio 4 Extra
  • Tue 21 Apr 202603:30
    BBC Radio 4 Extra