Cover Image: Notes to Self

Notes to Self

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Member Reviews

I really enjoyed Emilie Pine's honesty and transparency in Notes to Self. The book felt like reading Pine's journal or listening to her thoughts. She wrote the book in a serious of long essays about her life experiences, including her father's alcohol addiction, her infertility and miscarriages, her rebellious adolescence, and coming to terms with realizing she had been raped. Trigger warning: these topics can trigger emotions for many people. I am one of those people, but it helped me think through some of my own experiences and relate to her. There is something to be said about a person who is brave enough to be honest, then publish it to the entire world. Writing can be very cathartic and that came through in Emilie Pine's essays.

I felt an emotional connection to many of her life experiences. Many women can relate to Pine's experience with miscarriages and infertility, and many people have experience with addicts in their lives. I felt like every personal story Pine told, I could relate to in some way.

This book was also the perfect length and easy to devour in a few hours. I gave it 4/5 stars.

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Unvarnished ~ Universal ~ Unflinching

tl;dr: Essays ranging in topics from infertility to addiction

Pine's essays share unflinching looks at the hardest times in her life, from her father's addiction to her sister's still birth. These essays feel like chapters in a memoir that leaves nothing out. Pine writes about her challenges without romanticizing her problems. Pine is a woman who is willing "to bleed" as she says on the page for her writing. Pine was new to me, though she is a well-known Irish writer. These honest essays were one heck of an introduction to her voice. I found this book like a better written version of Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me essay. Definitely worth reading.
TW: Addiction, still birth, infertility

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

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Emilie Pine has written a raw honest open revealing book.She shares all spares herself nothing a very compelling read. # netgalley #randomhouse

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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.

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This book was really gripping. I love the rawness of emotions from the narrator along with the lyrical style. Some of it was too heavy for me but I appreciate the book and perspective overall.

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