Have you ever thought that you might organize your slippery life by how often you have only just kept it? O’Farrell tells her mother, “I’m trying to write a life told only through near-death experiences.”
In seventeen chapters variously titled Neck, Abdomen, Head, Cerebellum, Causes Unknown, she describes those moments when death glanced at her … and then moved past her. At 18, she talks her way away from a man who set a trap for her on a lonely trail in a park. The police push aside her report, but O’Farrell knows what could have happened. She tells us, “I have an instinct for the onset for violence.” At the time she knew: “That man didn’t hurt me, but he will hurt someone else.” But at 18, she could not overcome the police officer’s dismissal of her experience. Two days later, two detectives visited her. The same man had ambushed and murdered another young woman.
She escapes a collision, drowning, an airliner that veers out of control, amoebic dysentery. She writes about all this from the vantage point of a 42-year-old mother of three. She writes beautiful prose about what almost happened, always aware that the very act of setting all these moments down came ever so close to never happening. You read for both her stories and her sentences.
As you read, you also remember – that time when I jumped my bike off the sidewalk chasing a friend, jumped it into the street between parked cars so that the driver whose bumper knocked my tire askew would have seen me appear, like a magic trick, out of nowhere. I can hear the howl of his brakes. I can see, even now, 56 years later, the blanched face of the driver, his mouth opening.
That time when I turned back from the stream where I was filling canteens and a bear stood thirty feet away, and when I stood and slowly hunched toward my companion, the bear chopped his jaws, laid his ears back against his skull and growled.
That time at 6 weeks old when I was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery. That time… that time….
We are all lucky to be here. O’Farrell lets us know what we missed, and in doing so, what we possess.
