Notes to Self : Essays

The international sensation that illuminates the experiences women are supposed to hide—from addiction, anger, sexual assault, and infertility to joy, sensuality, and love.

WINNER OF THE AN POST IRISH BOOK OF THE YEAR • “Emilie Pine’s voice is razor-sharp and raw; her story is utterly original yet as familiar as my own breath.”—Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love Warrior

In this dazzling debut, Emilie Pine speaks to the events that have marked her life—those emotional disruptions for which our society has no adequate language, at once bittersweet, clandestine, and ordinary. She writes with radical honesty on the unspeakable grief of infertility, on caring for an alcoholic parent, on taboos around female bodies and female pain, on sexual violence and violence against the self. This is the story of one woman, and of all women.

Devastating, poignant, and wise—and joyful against the odds—Notes to Self is an unforgettable exploration of what it feels like to be alive, and a daring act of rebellion against a society that is more comfortable with women’s silence.

Praise for Notes to Self

“Notes to Self begins as a deceptively simple catalogue of the injustices of modern female life and slyly emerges as a screaming treatise on just what it means to make your own rules, turning the hand you’ve been dealt into the coolest game in town. Emilie Pine is like your best friend—if your best friend was so sharp she drew blood.”—Lena Dunham, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Not That Kind of Girl

“To read these essays is to understand the human condition more clearly, to reassess one’s place in the world, and to reclaim one’s own experiences as real and valid.”—Sunday Independent

“Harrowing, clear-eyed . . . Everyone should consider [this] priority reading.”—Sunday Business Post

“Incredible and insightful—an absolute must-read.”—The Skinny 

“Agonizing, uncompromising, starkly brilliant. . . . [A] short, gleamingly instructive book, both memoir and psychological exploration—a platform for that insistent internal voice that almost any woman . . . wishes they had ignored.”—Financial Times

“Do not read this book in public. It will make you cry.”—Anne Enright

Emilie Pine is associate professor of modern drama at University College Dublin, Ireland. Pine has published widely as an academic and critic on culture and memory. Notes to Self is her first collection of personal essays.