Photo credit: Murdo Macleod
Describe your latest book.
I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death is a memoir with a difference. Told in fragments, moving back and forward through time, it describes the months I spent in hospital after contracting encephalitis at the age of eight. It relates a teenage moment of madness by the sea, an encounter with a disturbed man on a mountainside, and a severe illness in rural China.
It purports to be about death but is actually about life: how we carry on, how we live in the face of challenges and obstacles, how we must make the most of the time we are given. It’s also about the human need for narrative, that atavistic urge to distill experience into story...