Notes to Self: Essays

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.

This was really well written - graphic at times but that’s the point. She doesn’t hold back. Really brave book as she reveals so much of herself.

On almost every page, this writer must have stopped and asked herself "do I really want to tell the world this ? - how do I walk my campus when they know what I'm about to tell them ?". And yet, page after page, she does just that. From the practical, intimate, blow-by-blow, self checking of her clothing and body as she compulsively tries to conceive, to heartbreaking admissions of disappointment towards her dysfunctional parents, this woman puts her soul out there. There is nothing more left for her to give by the end of this book. She seems drained. Almost as if her book itself becomes the birth she so craves thru-out it. Thru this, we watch her grow to powerful, and this man reader walked away enlightened but the suffering she so generously shares here.

a likable, relatable voice. I inhaled it in an afternoon and wished there was more! The essays were touching as well as thought-provoking, and very very human. I look forward to more from this author!

A mediocre book. Wished I'd saved my money. The end.

Emilie Pine’s book of essays is visceral, painful, and intimate. This is a book I will be recommending to every woman in my life so that there are more people who I can discuss it with, more people to whom I can say, “isn’t that so true?”.The opening essay chronicles Emilie’s traumatic experiences in dealing with her father’s failing health after years of alcoholism. It is a gut punch. It is both difficult to read and impossible to put down. It feels deeply specific to her experience, but at times I felt like yelling, “are you me?”. She makes such a personal experience feel larger and more universal than I would have imagined possible. She goes on to discuss divorce, infertility, loss, anorexia… all in deeply vulnerable and immediate language that feels like a rod tugging from my heart to hers. I read the first half of this collection in one sitting.For me, this book does start stronger than it ends, and I wish it had come together a little stronger at the end, but life is messy. Emilie is also clearly in a much better place now, which makes the rest of her experiences feel bearable. Or maybe the final chapters will feel heavier to me at a different point in my life. I think this is an incredible collection of experiences and memories that made me feel less alone, and for that I am grateful.

a breath of fresh air.

Empowering. Thought provoking. Honest. Brave. The author has an ability to Express what many feel but can not share .

Mir fehlen die Worte um dieses großartige Buch zu beschreiben. Es liegt so viel Wahrheit in den Essays und es braucht so viel Mut diese zu veröffentlichen. Ich habe mich teilweise selbst erkannt und an anderen Stellen einen Einblick in eine fremde Welt erhalten. Ich habe geweint und geschmunzelt und bin traurig dass es vorbei ist.

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.

I loved this book, the autobiographical content and the way it's wirtten, I hope to find another one like it!

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.)

It was in German, my mistake, so I ordered it again in English !