Notes to Self by Emilie Pine is a lesson in how to write about life’s painful truths

Having an alcoholic father and divorced parents, working her way through five different secondary schools , surviving a drug-fuelled adolescence and two rapes, and coming to terms with her infertility are the main themes in these six short, autobiographical essays. Pine, an Irish academic in her early forties who teaches modern drama at University College Dublin, received rave reviews, rightly, when the book came out in Ireland last year, for her clear, forthright approach to such intensely painful subjects.

“By the time we find him, he has been lying in a small pool of his own shit for several hours,” she begins the first essay, Notes on Intemperance, about her father, who has collapsed alone in his house in Corfu with liver failure. After travelling for 24 hours, she and her sister get to the hospital to find he has almost bled to death from a ruptured oesophagus. He recovers and stops drinking. Later, when Pine reads an article he has written for a health magazine about his salt-restricted, booze-free diet, she is so angry that he refuses to acknowledge the damage he has caused in the family that she decides to write this — her own version of events.

In Speaking/Not Speaking, she describes what it feels like to grow up with parents who don’t speak to each other — ever — and how much angrier she becomes when years later they reconcile.

In From the Baby Years, she evokes the grief of trying to have a baby, from the first faint blue line on a pregnancy test stick to the moment she turns 40, when she and her partner not only have to resign themselves, but are able to feel positive about their childless future.

The urge to write about only “the bad bits” of her life in her essay, Something About Me, in which she describes growing up poor, failing at school, discovering the power of not eating, enjoying the effect that her fragile body has on boys, losing her virginity, running away from home and being raped, “feels not only dangerous and fearful and shameful, but necessary”. More importantly it has allowed her to feel present in her own life and to comfort the damaged girl she once was. “I have not tried to tell anyone else’s story, but only to tell mine as truthfully as possible.” And while it may not ring true for every girl, it is still well worth hearing and it is very well told.

Notes to Self by Emilie Pine (Hamish Hamilton, £12.99)