I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

by Maggie O'Farrell

“I want to go on the run,” was one of her first sentences, said imploringly from the constraints of her pram.

nobody ever asks you what degree you got. It ceases to matter the moment you leave university. That the things in life which don’t go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do. You need to expect the unexpected, to embrace it. The best way, I am about to discover, is not always the easy way.

Arriving in Rome, age seventeen, was like receiving a blood transfusion.

I have never forgotten that bus ride from the airport into the centre of Rome, my first sighting of the city. And I have never lost the thrill of travel. I still crave the mental and physical jolt of being somewhere new, of descending aeroplane steps into a different climate, different faces, different languages.

Maternal love is a great force, greater perhaps than all others.