Notes to Self

April 15, 2019
A debut collection of personal essays on the meaning of being a woman living in a patriarchal society. Pine (Modern Drama/Univ. Coll. Dublin; The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture, 2010, etc.) breaks years of learned silence to take feminist aim at taboo subjects. The opening essay, "Notes on Intemperance," concerns her relationship with her father, a depressed alcoholic writer who "seemed happiest when he was as far away from his family as possible." As she chronicles his struggle to pull back from the brink of liver failure, she examines the difficult emotions she experienced as a loving daughter who raged inwardly at her father's profound selfishness. Her experiences starting a family of her own were no less painful, but for different reasons. In "From the Baby Years," Pine discusses the pain of agonizing over whether or not she wanted a baby and then undergoing several unsuccessful fertility treatments. In another essay, she considers the female body, discussing menstruation in a powerfully unfettered way. Daring to offer details about such topics as menstruation during sex, Pine calls attention to the way female bleeding--and, by extension, the female body--is still seen as unclean. She suggests that her own discomfort with even saying she is menstruating is evidence of the pernicious way "women are policed. And of how we police ourselves." In the most personally revealing essay, "Something About Me," the author chronicles her "wild child" teenage years when she was part of the London club scene. A lonely child from a broken and dysfunctional home, Pine skipped school, drank, drugged, and had sex with strangers. Eventually, university life saved her, and she became a professor. But as she writes in her essay about being a woman in an institution built on patriarchal values, that home had its own breakdown-inducing stressors. Bold and timely, Pine's book tells truths about being female and human that are as necessary to speak as they are to hear. A sharp, refreshingly frank collection from a fresh voice.

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May 1, 2019
A best-seller in the author's native Ireland, Pine's collection of six essays is a writer's personal reckoning with the unsayable. Present-tense narration brings readers intimately close to past events, beginning with her father's health scare precipitated by years of alcoholism. In a moving piece concerning infertility and miscarriage, she's told to relax, advice that seems perilously close to asserting that women's minds are dangerous to their bodies. In the past tense, she prods at and encircles her wild-child teen years to reveal truths of her young, imperiled self that she's hardly talked, let alone written about. Addressing periods, body hair, and menopause, Notes on Bleeding and Other Crimes would make good required reading for everyone. Pine's work as a drama professor is kept in the background, but it is essential to her message about internalized sexism and apparent in each skillfully unfolded essay. Resolutely confirming the still-radical notion that women's thoughts, memories, and bodies contain stories untold, this is a formidable read-alike for essay-memoirs like Ariel Levy's The Rules Do Not Apply (2017) and Laura June's Now My Heart Is Full (2018).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)