This is a biography but I don't think you will find many others like it. Maggie O'Farrell seems to have had more than her fair share of near-death experiences, and all this trauma allowed for seventeen chapters with a different traumatic event every time. Some of the events are health related, but on several occasions something just happened out of the blue that could have ended her life in an instant. Obviously she has survived everything that has been thrown at her, but it does make you wonder why some people seem to have so much to deal with when others sail through life with hardly a bump in the road. She nearly died from a childhood illness and then had to spend a couple of years in a wheelchair and never fully recovered all her muscular tone or brain reaction times. That residual low level of disability then went on to cause her great problems in childbirth, and on two other occasions she nearly drowned because her brain couldn't calculate how she wa...