“Everybody has to decide on the way they want to tell their own story from their own perspective,” insists Emilie Pine, talking about her debut collection of essays, Notes to Self, which offers a probing and unflinching personal account of experiences such as sexual violence, fertility, feminism, and addiction.
As an Associate Professor in Modern Drama at UCD, Pine is well versed and practiced in the essayistic approach to writing, a form she believes is all about trying something out. According to Pine, an essay allows you “to take one idea and look at it from several different angles. You begin with a premise you know, which is X, and by the time you get to the end, your conclusion should have a critical distance to it.”
For Pine, the “premise” of Notes to Self began in 2013 when her father went into liver failure as a result of forty years of alcoholism, spending twelve months in and out of hospital awaiting a prognosis. “I spent a lot of 2014 writing about it as a kind of catharsis,” says Pine. “I didn’t think of it as catharsis, I more thought of it as ‘this story is going round and round and round in my head and I don’t have enough room for it in my head so I’m going to put it on the page so I don’t have to think about it’ and I literally then wrote it down and put it in a drawer,” Pine admits. The resulting essay, ‘Notes on Intemperance,’ outlines the fraught and exhaustive process of loving someone with an addiction and is poignant in its candidness in recounting the multitude of contradictory emotions that accompanies such a relationship. “I think the best thing you can do is to try and recognise all of them rather than just trying to tell a really simplified version of the story, as if we only ever really had one emotion at a time which is never the case,” states Pine.
The essay, however, was not intended for publication and it was only when her partner found and read the story that Pine found the support and encouragement to send it to Tramp Press, who asked to see more. The result was five more essays, each as personal, honest and raw as the first as well, culminating in Tramp Press’ first foray into non-fiction.
It is evident that Pine has teased out and thoroughly examined all aspects of her experience to present deeply nuanced accounts that do not shy away from revealing the messy and complicated aspects of her life thus far. Her refreshing honesty has elicited many responses from emotional readers. “People have said that it reminds them of their own life, [but]it can’t because it’s about my life so it actually must be that… [the] more true to your own story you are, bizarrely, the more universal it is,” Pine reflects.
What is striking in this collection is the intersection of Pine’s experience with recent social, cultural and political history in Ireland, namely that of the Repeal the Eighth movement. ‘From the Baby Years’ is a heart-wrenching account of her struggle with infertility and the loneliness it can bring as well as the disempowerment felt by Pine when the circumstances of her miscarriage fall under the dictates of the Eighth Amendment. “What is amazing is when you set out to write your story – and every person in this country could do the equivalent – you realise the extent to which your life intersects with legislation, and if that legislation is all about shutting down or oppressing citizens, then it’s a very negative way in which you intersect with it…it never occurred to me, because I wanted to have children, that the Eighth Amendment would affect me. And yet it did,” admits Pine.
Published in what only can be called a watershed movement, both in Ireland with the Repeal the Eighth movement and indeed globally with #TimesUp, #MeToo, Pine is quick to credit the re-energising of feminism as giving her legitimacy in claiming a space to tell her story. When asked about writers who have influenced her, Pine commends the likes of Ariel Levy, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith and Roxane Gay for paving the way and unapologetically taking up literary, critical, political and cultural space and driving public debate. Interestingly, Pine has written critically on memoirs and has a key interest in memory studies, an understanding and deep knowledge she admits was a hindrance to her writing process. “When I was writing, I had to stop reading other people’s life-writing because I kept wanting to be like them if I liked them and being horrified that I couldn’t be…but then I had to realise that it would do damage to the story to try and be like anybody else.”
Moreover, Pine is keenly aware that the writers she mentions are all British and American. While she acknowledges the groundwork that has been done in Ireland by memoirs like Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody, the work of Sinead Gleeson, and the non-fiction published by The Dublin Review under Brendan Barrington, she asserts that there has not been a collection of essays like Notes to Self published in Ireland before. “The fact that the book has been so well received in Ireland definitely comes on the back of a more conscious feminist agenda in Ireland . When people say to me, as people have done, that they feel like the book is breaking a silence…it’s like a declaration of how big the silence is that we keep needing to break it,” Pine states, admitting that she still can’t fathom how issues of alcoholism and women’s bodily autonomy remain stigmatised in a modern Ireland.
Indeed, Pine’s essays not only tap into the still somewhat undercurrent of Irish society, but also expand upon and add further perspective to the lived experiences of women, particularly the ways in which women are expected to shrink themselves to comply to a particular form of femininity. In ‘Notes on Bleeding & Other Crimes,’ Pine tackles this directly by forensically examining the ways in which women have internalised the policing of their own bodies via dieting and the shame around periods and pubic hair. “Women are, my feeling is, still encouraged to sanitise or smooth over or not be challenging or not be disruptive and we get that from the moment we’re babies,” laments Pine. She believes such conditioning is damaging not only to women but also men. Moreover, Pine is unabashedly honest throughout this essay and others in her shortcomings to live up to the ideals embodied by the feminist movement and acknowledges that justas people are contradictory, so too will be their adherence to these ideals
Does Pine believe that her collection of essays accomplishes what she set out to do? Namely, to pin down and examine her experiences and memories while establishing a critical distance? As one would expect, Pine is cerebral in her response and while she acknowledges that the stories no longer go around in her head and she does not feel the urge to rewrite any of them, she is aware that “it’s a little bit dangerous sometimes to publish something because it becomes the version, the story and there are always multiple versions, so in my head actually there are still lots of alternate versions competing for attention.”
Does this mean she will write more essays in the future? Acknowledging that she can never write Notes to Self again, wryly admitting that, “I don’t have any more trauma,” she is keen to take the way she wrote her collection and apply it to other stories. If it is anything like her first foray into non-fiction, it will no doubt continue to mark a new trailblazing pathway for Irish female writers.
A review of Notes to Self, also by Ciara Forristal, can be found in the TN2 print edition released on September 6th. She gives the collection five stars.
