I am, I am, I am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

"Yes, Maggie O’Farrell, our alumna! This is a brilliantly constructed book because you’re reading it and thinking, ‘Can you just stop taking so many risks? 17 brushes with death and you think, well, you keep jumping into the sea, walking on your own, hitchhiking in dangerous areas, why do you keep taking all these risks?’ And then, at the end, she reveals that she nearly died as a child and overheard a nurse say to another child, ‘Hush, there’s a little girl dying in there.’ Gosh, how would that affect you in your life? But the fact that rather than it making her scared in her life, it made her seize life. Rather than thinking, ‘I’m really unlucky because I got encephalitis when I was a child, I nearly died and have been left with a disability,’ she says she is a lucky person: “I have been showered with shamrocks, my pockets filled with rabbits’ feet, found the crock of gold at the end of every rainbow. I could not have asked for more from life.” I admire all these women because they didn’t let adversity destroy them. They use their adversity to turn themselves into women who seize control of their own lives, do what they want and achieve amazing things. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Maggie O’Farrell also describes how terrible miscarriage is. People talk about that more now, but even a few years ago people did not talk about miscarriage and stillbirth. I made a film seven years ago about stillbirth, which was one of the first major documentaries in the United Kingdom about stillbirth. And the reason that I commissioned it was that my best friend from school had a stillborn baby, and afterwards they took the baby away and she was expected to move on. People didn’t really talk about it. And actually when I was at Channel 4 we introduced a baby loss policy and a key part of the policy was that we educated the staff about what to do when somebody loses a baby. So when they come back to work, you don’t ignore what happened. You say, ‘I’m very sorry that you lost your baby. What was her name? And tell me, what was she like?’ And I just can’t describe how just within a few years what an enormous change that was. I can’t remember when Maggie O’Farrell wrote this book, but even at the time she wrote it, which was only a few years ago, women didn’t speak about having miscarriages or stillbirths. There was this sort of feeling that, well, that just happens, it’s natural, move on. Of course people don’t move on. Maggie O’Farrell describes how she can say what age every one of her miscarried babies would be now. That one little thing tells you so much about how false the idea is that you just get over it. That’s because the narrative about miscarriages was created by men. And doctors, who were traditionally men, say to women, ‘Don’t worry, miscarriages are normal, you will have another baby, move on and forget it.’ And of course I was brought up a Catholic, and we were taught that a foetus is a human being from the moment of conception. But if a woman had a miscarriage or gave birth to a full-term stillborn baby, the Roman Catholic Church would not baptise that stillborn baby, and they could not be buried properly. So hang on a minute here, Roman Catholic Church, the baby’s supposed to be a baby from the moment of conception, but if they’re born full term, stillborn, you won’t baptise them? Riddle me that one. That was an act of the most extraordinary cruelty to Catholic women. These women lost their babies and then they believed their babies were hanging in limbo till the end of time, and then nobody ever talked about it. So I really admire Maggie O’Farrell, particularly for talking about miscarriage."