I won a Goodreads ARC Giveaway for this memoir/collection of personal essays by debut author Emilie Pine. Titled "Notes to Self" on my ARC paperback copy, the back cover states that the expected publication date for this book is June 2019.On a prose level, this book is very good. Ms. Pine is a fine writer. "Notes to Self" is also a very short book. While the content is often very sad, this is a pretty quick read. Here is a list of the essays in this book, and their general content:*****1. "Notes I won a Goodreads ARC Giveaway for this memoir/collection of personal essays by debut author Emilie Pine. Titled "Notes to Self" on my ARC paperback copy, the back cover states that the expected publication date for this book is June 2019.On a prose level, this book is very good. Ms. Pine is a fine writer. "Notes to Self" is also a very short book. While the content is often very sad, this is a pretty quick read. Here is a list of the essays in this book, and their general content:*****1. "Notes on Intemperance" focuses on Ms. Pine's alcoholic-turned-sober father and her complicated love for him. My own father was an extreme alcoholic who died after years of being homeless, living on a riverbank just outside Cincinnati, so I expected that this essay would really resonate with me. Instead, the first essay read the flattest to me. I know that part of the blandness in this essay for me was the fact that Ms. Pine had access to so many resources, family, and friends to lessen "the burden" of her father's struggles upon her own life, including a friend of her father's who helped him tremendously, even inspiring him to get sober. Ms. Pine read as being very, very fortunate to me, but her tone was one of victimization throughout the bulk of the essay. I also lost my father young while Ms. Pine's father is still alive and well. I would be so incredibly grateful if my father were still alive. I understand the complicated love for addicts, and I appreciate Ms. Pine's struggles. This particular essay just didn't have the intended effect for me at all. I kept thinking, "I wish my life had been this easy," when her tone was one of, "Oh my god, look how bad I have it." People with lives that more closely resemble Ms. Pine's middle-class upbringing will probably enjoy this essay a lot more than I did. 2. "From the Baby Years" discusses Ms. Pine's struggles with infertility, her miscarriage, and her sister's experiences with childbirth. I was moved to tears as I read about Ms. Pine's sister's experiences. It was the only place in the book that moved me. 3. "Speaking/Not Speaking" deals with Ms. Pine's youth. Her parents separated in 1982, when Ms. Pine was five, but divorce wasn't legal in Ireland until 1997, when Ms. Pine was twenty. I had no idea that divorce was illegal in Ireland for so long!! That shocked me to realize I was so clueless. But the essay isn't about the underpinnings of conservatism in Ireland at all; it is about Ms. Pine's inability to talk about divorce until it was finally legalized. 4. "Notes on Bleeding and Other Crimes" focuses on Ms. Pine b*tching about menstrual blood and cramps, as well as shaving her armpits and conforming to all of the appearance commands that women are given, and then realizing that menopause means the possibility of "losing" her womanhood: "I fear that the end of my period is the end of being a woman" (page 97). This is also the first essay in which Ms. Pine admits that she developed a severe eating disorder at age ten, when she began starving herself. She continued to starve herself until the age of twenty or so, when she was in college, and then she continued to inflict/suffer from bouts of starvation on and off over the years. Her self-imposed starvation sounds a lot like anorexia to me, though Ms. Pine never uses the terms "anorexia" or "eating disorder" anywhere in the book. 5. "Something About Me" was my favorite essay. It details Ms. Pine's rebellious youth as a self-starving adolescent who became the life of any and all parties, staying out all night at clubs in London, drinking and drugging to extremely self-destructive and suicidal levels. Ms. Pine started drinking and drugging at a young age. She states that she lost her virginity at age thirteen. She had a number of sexual partners. Two of her partners raped her, and one man was her boyfriend at the time. This is a long essay, and it had direct bearing upon essay #2, but the author never ties the two essays together. I'll discuss this more below, but for now, I'll just say that the book really took a serious dive in enjoyment-level for me when I realized how much insight and depth these essays truly lacked as a whole. 6. "This Is Not on the Exam" sketches out some highlights and low-lights from Ms. Pine's successful career as an academic. The book jacket states that she is "Associate Professor of Modern Drama at University of Dublin College Dublin, Ireland." I'm not sure what kind of work that entails, and the final essay didn't provide any details outside of a few anecdotes about the author talking to students. Ms. Pine focuses on being overworked, the stresses of the university outsourcing its funding by telling academics to bring in their own money with grant projects, and then the burnout she suffered when she performed all of this extra unpaid work with very successful financial results that came with a horrible emotional toll.*****I would recommend this book to any reader who is new to the idea of women struggling to talk about divorce, having periods, suffering cramps, infertility, miscarriage, developing an eating disorder at a young age, self-destructive partying, and having alcoholic parents.Personally, none of this material was new to me, and if you are already familiar with any of the above topics, I would recommend these powerhouse reads instead:"The Beauty Myth" by Naomi Wolfanything written by bell hooks"Pornland" by Gail Dines"Woman: An Intimate Geography" by Natalie AngierMs. Pine does acknowledge in "Notes to Self" that she is "a white, Western, middleclass, heterosexual, cis-gender woman" (page 101). She never leaves that limited perspective; this book is solely focused on Ms. Pine and her own experiences. While I can completely respect that choice, Ms. Pine often adopts a tone as if she is speaking for "all women." As a reader, I was constantly reminded that this book was very limited and did not speak for "all women," and I only differ from the author in class, regarding her own list of traits. The author's limitations are why I closed this book feeling like the only things I learned were the date divorce was legalized in Ireland and how absolutely, and tragically, clueless these essays often felt to read. Again, I must state that I wasn't the intended reader for this book. I think the intended reader is obviously someone whose own experiences better mirror the author's: middle-class white women who have led financially successful careers. Here are some realizations I had that are never addressed in these essays: 1. I can tell that Ms. Pine was *very* externally motivated throughout her whole life. Her external motivations were strong enough to starve herself for "skinny" praise as a child, become a gregarious party girl in adolescence, do well at college, and be very successful in her chosen career. As a highly externally-motivated person, Ms. Pine has made a very strong initial effort at finally examining her unplumbed interior. These essays read as a good, strong initial start at Ms. Pine trying to understand herself. Unfortunately for my enjoyment level, I don't think she's read any of the books I listed above. Because this book of memoir-essays is far, far too limited for me to ever believe Ms. Pine is familiar with Naomi Wolf, bell hooks, Gail Dines, or Natalie Angier.2. Ms. Pine has obviously never researched the effects of starvation in adolescent girls. Her severe starvation began at age ten and continued until she was twenty or so, with bouts of anorexia (or her self-imposed starvation) throughout her twenties. I know that starvation has immediate and long-lasting impacts on fertility, especially on the fertility of young girls and young women. In essay #2, Ms. Pine laments her infertility at age 37, 38, and 39, when she started trying to have a child and found that she couldn't: "For all the research and testing -- mine and the medical profession's -- I still don't know what went 'wrong' with my body. Why is that?" (page 67). I don't think that Ms. Pine has ever learned that a woman's highest fertility levels are during her teenage years, the years Ms. Pine spent depriving herself of the nutrients her body needed to be fertile. Overall, women's fertility decreases slightly between the ages of 20-28, taking a sharp nosedive at age 28, and declining at a faster rate until the age of 35, when fertility levels suddenly plummet. That is only for women who have not yet had a child, however. Pregnancy changes things quite a bit. Whatever age a woman gives birth to her first child, her fertility will basically remain at that level until menopause. Teenage mothers have the highest fertility levels up until menopause. Women who have their first child in their early twenties are a close second.This isn't to say that older women cannot be fertile, or safely give birth past the age of 35. I'm saying that Ms. Pine admits that she wanted to know what was 'wrong' with her body at age 37 that stopped her from having a baby, after nothing was revealed to be physically wrong with her reproductive organs, and yet she never reflected upon the negative impact and lasting trauma her starvation inflicted upon her fertility, starting from the ages of 10-20 and then into her 20s. There are some traumas the body can readily recover from. Other traumas have lasting and permanent damage. I know this from studying the biological effects of poverty: poverty does permanent physical damage to a child's body. Starvation and malnutrition in children are highly detrimental to growth and long-term adult health. I'm not blaming Ms. Pine for her eating disorder or any of the problems in her life. I am stating that one of her essays *answered* the question she herself asked: "What went 'wrong' with my body?" -- i.e. why was I so infertile in my thirties when my reproductive organs were all sound? -- and yet she never, ever reflects on the impact her many years of starvation had on her own fertility.3. Ms. Pine is a very good writer, and I'm glad she has finally given herself permission to talk about her shame, her hardships, and her traumas in life. I wish her all the best on her journey. She shares many good messages about trying to accept herself as she is. I hope she does some research about ageism soon, because she seems especially uninformed about that. Her extreme dread of aging feels very sad to me. I also hope she reads "The Beauty Myth" by Naomi Wolf. If I were her friend, I would press that book into her hands immediately. She would understand that she fell victim to that myth in a big, big way. She could forgive herself even more, I think, if she took the time to read that book.Overall rating: 3 stars. Glennon Doyle (formerly Glennon Doyle Melton) wrote the blurb on the front of my ARC copy. Personally, I think Glennon Doyle's memoir, "Love Warrior," was a far better book than this collection of memoir-essays. "Notes to Self" is definitely a book where a reader's mileage will vary, depending upon how familiar they are with the book's content and themes, and how closely their own background mirrors the author's. **Thank you to Random House Marketing for providing me with a free ARC paperback copy of this book.
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