Review Summaries

• Its raw and direct prose has drawn strong responses, and the structure is valued for widening personal experience into social questioning. Although it deals with pain, it leaves a sense of endurance and hope.

Reviews

• Every woman must read it!

  It’s a beautiful book. Raw, unfiltered essays on being a woman, a daughter, a mother and a body in pain. She writes about infertility, addiction, shame, silence and finally, the choice to speak. About being a failing and successful feminist. Uncomfortable in all the right ways. If you’re tired of polished lives and need truth, this will hit.

• Painfully personal essays

  I’m struggling to process this book but I’ll try my best to articulate... Emilie Pine’s ‘Notes To Self’, a collection of six essays on varied themes, part-memoir and part-social-critique, is one of the all-time best books I have ever read. It’s up there with Tristimania and The White Book and Misery and my other favourites. Pine’s writing, characterised by brutal honesty and a tone that is at once direct, impersonal, conversational, and considered, is like a flurry of punches coming off the page, each essay teeming with vital meditations on death, life, feminism, trauma, identity... these are essays that implore to be read, by a world that is still terrified to talk about the things that Pine manages to confront, despite the fear and difficulty: “I am afraid. But I am doing it anyway.” The reviews are true, when they warn you that you’ll cry reading this book; what no one can prepare you for is how this book will take the personal details of its writer and subject, and make a lance right to your own heart. For me, the essay “Speaking / Not Speaking”, a retrospective look at her parents’ divorce and the decades of fallout, resonated painfully and deeply: “How is it that we were made to endure so much acrimony for so long? And how is it, why is it, that no one has ever said sorry to me or my sister?” I beg you to buy this book and open up your heart. (And, as an aside, congratulations to my favourite independent publisher, Tramp Press, on a sensational publication.)

• Ein wichtige neue amerikanische Stimme

  Emilie Pines Buch ist innerhalt kürzester Zeit zu einem wichtigen Bestseller im Sommer 2019 geworden. Es ist das literarische Debüt der Literaturprofessorin, in dem sie wichtige, kritsche und sehr fragile Momente in ihrem Leben beschreibt, wie den eigenen Kampf ein Baby bekommen zu können, die Momente, als ihre Eltern ihre Scheidung vollziehen, die Trunksucht eines Elternteils, oder der Vater, der völlig hilflos in einem griechischen Spitals liegt, in dem nichts funktioniert und die beiden Schwestern sich rund um die Uhr abwechseln als Krankenschwestern betätigen müssen, damit der Vater wieder gesunden und mit nach Hause kommen kann. Es sind verstörende Stücke Literatur mit Essay-haftem, dennoch sehr literarischem Charakter, die großartig geschrieben und übersetzt sind, und die ich allen, die nach einer besonderen Sommerlektüre suchen, sehr empfehlen kann.

• Heartbreaking

  Thanking Emilie Pine for her sincere, honest, heart-stealing story. I have enjoyed every line of it. To dig so deep into oneself, and to be able to put it all out there for others to read is very brave and inspiring. A highly recommended read.

• Amazing book about the lives we all live but rarely admit to

  I have just finished binge reading this superb book. I noticed it because the author is at University College Dublin where my son plans to study and I am thus interested in anything to do with UCD. But as a 70 year old man I would have thought this book was not for me. I picked it up, read a few paragraphs, and was hooked. It is a book for me after all. These are most particularly the author's stories, but also women’s stories in general. It turns out that they are also universal stories about how we live our lives, male or female, young or old, often in silent anguish, not quite knowing where all that anguish came from in the first place. So this book spoke directly to me and my life in way that I would not have expected and perhaps the author would not have expected either. It deserves to be widely read and discussed.

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