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  • Published: 31 January 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241986233
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 192

Notes to Self




Radically honest and fiercely intelligent, the word-of-mouth #1 bestseller on modern womanhood and coming-of-age

'I am afraid of being the disruptive woman. And of not being disruptive enough. I am afraid. But I am doing it anyway.'

In this dazzling debut, Emilie Pine speaks powerfully from her painful personal experience - on the emotional labour of caring for her alcoholic father, on the unspeakable grief of miscarriage and infertility, on the social taboos around menstrual blood and female pain, on the ways young women use their own bodies as a weapon against themselves. Courageous, humane and uncompromising, devastatingly poignant and yet never self-pitying, these pieces investigate and challenge society's assumptions around pain, strength, resilience and identity, ultimately embracing joy and hope in the business of living.

  • Published: 31 January 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241986233
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 192

About the author

Emilie Pine

Emilie Pine is Associate Professor of Modern Drama at University College Dublin, Ireland. She has published widely as an academic and critic. Notes to Self is her first collection of personal essays and the winner of The Butler Literary Award 2018.

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Praise for Notes to Self

An astonishingly fine book

Dublin Review of Books

Light on its feet and goes in deep

Deborah Levy

Wry, shocking, winningly frank . . . What is most striking about the collection is its universality. [These stories] urgently need to be told. Pine does so with an honesty and vigour that are always uplifting

Guardian

This compelling memoir crystallises the human experience and gives words to the feelings you never knew you had

Sunday Times Style

A truly brilliant writer . . . A great book

Evening Standard

A brilliant collection

David Nicholls

An exceptional collection of essays . . . Pine's sharp, unadorned writing style allows the unobscured truths to rise to the surface

Refinery29

What resonates is Pine's articulation of the small, cumulative frustrations of life as a woman

FT