Maggie O’Farrell has opened up about how her several near-death experiences led to her writing Hamnet – and to her saying yes to the film adaptation.
The author, 53, has found herself in the spotlight after the screen adaptation of her 2020 novel, about the death of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son, went on to become a hit film, earning its lead star Jessie Buckley an Oscar and O’Farrell a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.
In a new interview with The Times, O’Farrell spoke about how she wrote the novel after she published her bestselling 2017 memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. In I Am… the author details her several brushes with death, including her first at age eight when she was diagnosed with encephalitis, a life-threatening inflammation of the brain. The illness left her in a wheelchair for a year.
“I did need to write I Am… before Hamnet,” she told the publication. “Almost dying reconfigures you and the way you think about the world.
“I don’t go around with a black crow on my shoulder. I think it’s had the opposite effect. It doesn’t make me feel anxious.”
She continued: “Life is fragile and it’s brief and my thinking is, ‘Let’s just pack in as much as I can. Say yes to as many things as I can.”
Earlier in the interview, O’Farrell had spoken about her initial hesitation about coming on board the Hamnet film as a screenwriter.
Eventually she said yes because she was about to turn 50 and “it’s good to try new things, to step outside what you’re used to”.
Elsewhere in her memoir, O’Farrell recalls almost losing her daughter – who was born with potentially fatal allergies – to an unforeseen reaction on holiday.
Published in 2020, Hamnet won the Women’s Prize for Fiction that year, and the fiction prize at the National Book Critics Circle awards. The film adaptation, directed by Chloé Zhao and starring Buckley opposite Paul Mescal, grossed £75m at the global box office.
“It feels like winning the lottery, in different ways,” said O’Farrell of her novel’s success. “But it will probably never happen again, so I just have to enjoy it and then move on and make something new. I think if I come at it from the angle of, ‘There’s going to be a lot of pressure on me as a result,’ I’m slightly missing the joy of it.”
She added that plans to “carry on” and “get back to work”.
O’Farrell is publishing her next book in June. Set in the west of Ireland in 1865, Land is a multigenerational family epic that follows a son and his father working for the Great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland.
Land is O’Farrell’s 10th novel, having previously written nine others as well as children’s books and her memoir.
