Notes to Self by Emilie Pine

One of the flourishing genres that I like is the personal essay. I love it when they’re funny (Casey Wilson’s The Wreckage of My Presence is one of the best things I’ve read this year), but I also enjoy them when they’re more poignant. And lordy me, Notes to Self (2018) by Emilie Pine certainly isn’t a laugh a minute – but it is very, very good.

I think I saw a few people reading it on Instagram last year, and added it to my Christmas list – many thanks Mum and Dad for buying it for me. It’s a collection of six essays which are more or less all about trauma, of one sort or another. The first is about her father – an alcoholic who won’t admit the severity of his problem, and who has escaped his family in Ireland to live a chaotic life on Corfu. Pine flies out when she hears that he is desperately ill.

They call him ‘the Corpse’. He’s attached to machines that monitor his heart and other major organs. He has two IV lines, though the nurses struggle to find a vein that will take them as he has lost so much blood. He is barely awake most of the time. We’re oblivious to his nickname until a Greek visitor lets us in on the joke. Typically, as with most things concerning Dad, it’s both funny and not funny. Nobody, not even the nurses, thinks he’s going to live through this. And yet – he refuses to die.

Like all the essays in the collection, this one – ‘Notes on Intemperance’ (which, fittingly, I misread as ‘Notes on Impermanence’) – is a beautiful, steady unravelling of a topic. Pine’s writing is so steady. Even when she is discussing deeply emotional topics, she takes her time to unwrap them, layer by layer. By the time she has exposed the heart of the issue, whether that be her father’s alcoholism or her parents’ separation or rape and sexual assault, it is the logical conclusion of a series of keenly observed steps. And it is all the more striking because of that.

Pine writes plainly and without many literary flourishes. It means, when the occasional metaphor or imagery comes, it is extremely powerful. She waits until there is exactly the right one to illuminate the moment, and it jolts the reader in the way that really good imagery should. Sometimes it is isn’t even a metaphor, really, just a powerful combination of words. I noted down this excerpt from an essay on trying to have children, as an example of writing which comes together so neatly and effectively:

Maybe if I were more easy-going. More placid. More, well, more maternal, all cuddly and warm. Maybe if I were completely different, if I could swap out every cell, and gene, and chromosome in my body, maybe then this would work. In the early hours of the morning, unable to find sleep, I realise that what I’m trying to be cured of is being me.

That essay, ‘From the Baby Years’, is perhaps the best in the collection in my opinion. She manages to convey the sustained periods of hope and disappointment, as well as a miscarriage and other friends and relatives experiencing trauma related to childbirth. Pine never wallows in despair, but recognises it as the fundamental part of human experience that it so often is. Indeed, it’s impressive that a book this weighted with grief and trauma doesn’t feel heavy – even when it is heartbreaking or infuriating. And I think that’s because of the careful simplicity with which Pine writes the essays.

All in all, a brilliant book – not for every mood, but it is an oddly beautiful experience to share these pages with someone as vulnerable and honest and profound as Emilie Pine.