Notes to Self
Emilie Pine
Hamish Hamilton, £12.99
BY ALISON ROWAT
ONE of the striking aspects of the #MeToo phenomenon was the way decades of hurt were compressed into brief tweets. All those women, finding their voices at last. But where would they go next, one wondered. The answer would seem to be branching into collections of essays, of which Emilie Pine’s is the latest.
Pine, Associate Professor of Modern Drama at University College, Dublin, has a wider story to tell than appalling treatment at the hands of men, although she has had experience of that. Her despatch from the front line of contemporary womanhood takes in a wide variety of subjects, from being the child of an alcoholic to the pain of infertility.
Running like a thread through it all is anger, then relief, as she finds the courage to set down what she wants to say. While she has been published before as an academic and critic, this is her first book of personal essays, and what a heartfelt, beautifully written collection she has assembled. It is brief, though, at just over 200 pages. Doubtless a male writer would think his life worthy of more.
One of the strongest pieces is Notes on Intemperance, dealing with her father’s drinking. “By the time we find him he has been lying in a small pool of his own shit for several hours,” is her arresting opener as she sets the scene in the Corfu hospital to which she and her sister have rushed from Ireland.
The place is a shambles, with hardly any staff. “In the weeks that follow, this will be the pattern that our time takes: hours of waiting, followed by a struggle to attract official attention, only to be told something that we already know. After years of teaching Beckett plays, I am finally living in one.” It is a lovely injection of humour and one wishes there could have been more.
She learns that the staff have nicknamed her father “the corpse”. “Typically, as with most things concerning Dad, it’s both funny and not funny.” She is so fond of this formula she repeats it later when describing her parents meeting again. “It was surreally funny and not funny at all.” A minor complaint, but given the quality of the writing overall, such repetition jars.
More of a concern is something left unexplained. It comes in the essay about her wild teenage years in London when Pine thought she was “bulletproof”, only to learn otherwise. Having described how poor the family was after her parents’ separation, she ends a long segment on being kicked out of school with the declaration: “Mum wouldn’t accept defeat so easily, so the only option left was for her to find the money to send me to a private school.”
That is it, no further explanation. Where did she find the money? What happened to the grinding poverty?
There were other pieces I could have lived without, but likely that is my age talking. Life really is too bleeding short to read an essay about menstruating. Otherwise, what Pine has to say about the pain of infertility and the rigmarole of IVF is essential, original writing that will strike a chord with many.
Her best essays stem from crises and turning points, and she is on weaker ground when covering the more mundane, such as the sexism in everyday working life. Again, this is probably a stage of life thing. She writes perceptively about Ireland and its attitudes to divorce and abortion.
Indeed, there is so much here worth saying that one only hopes Pine has a longer book in her. She recalls that when she was growing up her father, an author and journalist, made her promise she would not become a writer, so hard had he toiled at the literary coalface.
“I solemnly said the words. But inwardly I knew that I would do the opposite. Because what my dad really taught me, despite himself perhaps, is that writing is a way of making sense of the world, a way of processing - of possessing - thought and emotion, a way of making something worthwhile out of pain.”
Congratulations Emilie Pine, you have succeeded.
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