Hi, my name is Emilie Pine and I am the author of Notes to Self. This is a book
about all those things that we know we shouldn't say out loud but I decided
that I would write them down and own up to all the things that I am embarrassed
about, ashamed about, that are difficult, the difficult emotions in our lives.
This is a collection of personal essays about my life, my family's life and all
the things I had kept hidden for years. I'm here in Waterstones Piccadilly and
I'm here to share four of my favourite books and my first choice is Kate
O'Brien and a novel called The Land Of Spices. It was banned when it was
first published in the 1940s for being obscene, banned in Ireland that is
and not unbanned until the 1960s. I really feel like O'Brien missed her
window as a result and she's a fantastic writer. And she has written, she lived in
Spain for years and then wrote a lot about Spain, but this is a novel set in
Ireland and it's set in a convent boarding school and has two central
characters. Anna Murphy who's the child who gets brought to boarding school and then
the Reverend Mother who is a really complicated character, really kind of
quiet, quite silent actually on the outside but on the inside she's still
the private person, Helen Archer, who was the girl before she became the nun. And
they develop this really complex relationship where they each enable the
other to be brought out of herself. And what I love at the end of the novel is
that Anna Murphy she's about to leave school and become a woman and she
thinks about what she will do with her life and she thinks about all of the
different careers that are open to her and writing is the thing that she dreams
of doing. And this idea that through writing you can discover the world and
own the world and that for me was incredibly inspiring then but also now
as well. So my second choice, also fiction, is a collection of short stories called
Where The God Of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom. I didn't use to read a lot of
short stories but a few years ago I went through something that was really
emotionally difficult and I found that in the wake of it I couldn't read
anymore. I couldn't stay with something as long
as a novel. And my partner gave me this and said I think this could help you and
I thought yeah I can concentrate for 10 pages at a time. And it helps that, I mean
the clue's in the title, all of the stories are about love in some way. And I
really feel like this collection brought me back to life. We go through the
lives of so many characters who are struggling or who are lonely or who are
alone or married but still isolated or in families where they can't
communicate with each other or where something goes catastrophically wrong and
yet the attempt is always to come back to love in some way. And I just I felt by
the end of the collection that there was so much faith in this and hope for
an emotion that is so difficult in in real life. And she manages it and
it gave me a faith back in free living again and that meant a lot to me.
And I just think she's an incredible writer, both a novelist and a short story
writer, but her short stories are really incredible. She has a series of short
stories called the William and Claire stories that follow characters
through different parts of their lives.
I think she's captivating and I would love to see more people reading her books.
So I'm now in the true-crime section at Waterstones which is not
where I would normally find myself and this is the next book that I want to
recommend. It's The Red Parts: an autobiography of a trial by Maggie
Nelson. I would normally look for her in the memoir section and I have to say that I
I was kind of slow to come to this book because of its categorization as crime.
Nelson makes it about so much more right. It's also the story of the end of a
relationship, it's a story of a family, and she's talking about the murder of
her aunt which she had previously written a collection of poetry about and
here she is moving into nonfiction prose. And she talks about how after a distance
of about 30 years the person who the police believed was responsible for her
aunt's death is finally put on trial, there's finally evidence against him, and
she talks about attending the trial with her family and the stress that
that puts them all under. I love the way she weaves
insight into herself, introspection about the process of sitting in a courtroom
for weeks, thinking about the impact of that on her family with her mother and
her grandfather who are mourning the loss of a real person. And then also
in a more abstract sense the way she talks about how we represent violence
against women. So one of the things she does in the book is discuss the
photographs of her aunt Jane that are used in the trial and how alienating
those photographs are. That they are evidence of a crime not evidence of a
person's life. I just think it's really beautiful. I mean it's also just a great read.
And to finish off we're in the graphic novel section and looking at
One Hundred Demons by Lynda Barry. This is an extraordinary book that I only
discovered recently. I love graphic novels. I think so many of them are
misnamed, they're actually graphic memoirs, but there is a kind of
fictional element I suppose to it as well. A colleague of mine and I, we were
co-teaching this course and she put this on it and I read it and I was so thankful
that we got to do co-teaching because I wouldn't have discovered it
otherwise. It's an insight into Barry's childhood and growing up in America but
as part of an immigrant family and that sense of a kind of hyphenated existence
where you are both from this community but also from elsewhere. And how the
difficult challenges that are - Barry has this thing about how her house smells
differently to everybody else's because they cook different kinds of food and
that feeling of belonging that comes through food but also not belonging as
well, being told that you're different. And one of the things that I really
love about this is that right at the end she has this section where she talks
about how she makes the art. And so she shows us the tools that she uses and
talks about the process that she uses and you see you know an actual
photograph of Barry herself at work. And I love that insight into this.
You know, books don't just magically appear, they get made. And that they're
material object as well. And you know the authors and the readers are
both involved in processing and holding and sharing the work. And that
the work is a result of effort and it's not
just flung down on the page. That it has its own journey to it as well.
So Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons, it's really fantastic.