“Emilie Pine’s voice is razor-sharp and raw; her story is utterly original and as familiar as my own breath. Both timeless and urgent, Notes to Self is my favorite memoir of the year—I will be giving copies of this stunning book to all of my friends.”
—GLENNON DOYLE, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love Warrior
“Do not read this book in public: it will make you cry.”
—ANNE ENRIGHT, Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Gathering
“Every line pulses with the pain and joy and complexity of an extraordinary life.”
—MARK O’CONNELL, author of To Be A Machine
“Absolutely superb.”
—Irish Examiner
“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
“The writing is so clean and accessible that each slice of her life is rendered crystal clear, yet there is room for paradox, complexity and humour. 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
“Having read the first essay of these six personal pieces, you will spend the next few days telling people about it….Such is the strength of the opening essay that, were it followed by 150 blank pages, this book would still be worth buying. As it turns out, the second inclusion, ‘From the Baby Years,’ is equally strong—I cried twice reading it….[Pine] learns to speak of rape and menstrual blood, to look at and appreciate her body, to stop mistaking femininity for weakness….Fascinating and relatable throughout. As soon as you think you know her, she reveals another side….I have already recommended this to several people. And I’m doing the same here.”
—The Sunday Times
“[Pine’s] writing is clear and urgent, the kind that makes you sit up and take notice….Well worth reading—not just for Pine’s no-nonsense honesty when it comes to subjects many of us still aren’t comfortable discussing, but also because she’s acutely aware of how she’s shaped the story of her life in these pages.”
—Independent
“I’ve never read anything quite like these essays. Pine’s fluent intelligence flows through each question, each dilemma, in its own inimitable way. It’s the kind of book you want to give to everyone, especially young women and men, so that we can learn together to take ourselves and each other more seriously.”
—Irish Times
“Brave, wise and beautifully nuanced, the six essays explore subjects that have traditionally been considered off-limits….Though in the essays she pushes herself into painful, sometimes traumatic, memories, there is humour in the darkness and vice versa. She is excellent at capturing contradiction and the complexity of human emotions—how happiness can contain grief, how the act of writing can make the writer powerful and vulnerable at once.”
—Irish Independent
“In turn heartbreaking and heart-mending, raw and searingly honest.”
—RTÉ
“With pinpoint precision, [Emilie Pine] welcomes readers into select, deeply personal parts of herself and explores them with beautiful nuance….It is the kind of writing we should be grateful to have—that someone was so willing to lay the harsh, at times heartbreaking realities of life on the page in such beautiful essays. Incredible and insightful—an absolute must-read.”
—The Skinny
“Agonising…uncompromising…starkly brilliant…[a] short, gleamingly instructive book, both memoir and psychological exploration, [which] transcends the trope of the misery-as-therapy narrative so radically that it becomes something else entirely—a platform for that insistent internal voice that almost any woman, having somehow navigated her way to early middle age, wishes they had not ignored at crucial moments, or, on reflection, at any moment. It is disarmingly bold in its candor, discussing, head-on, taboo subjects….Pine is not simply ‘making something worthwhile out of pain’ but showing others that they can do so, too.”
—Financial Times
“It would be hard to find writing more powerful than that in these essays….These are notes for everyone.”
—Image Magazine
“Every woman has that writer that makes them feel less alone in their own bodies, who, through their refusal to be silent about insecurity and embarrassment, answers the clawing question ‘is it just me who feels like this?’ Emilie Pine is that writer.”
—Totally Dublin