I spend probably too much time pondering the difference between personal essay and criticism and non-fiction and auto-theory, so there was something kind of pleasing about reading something that was so squarely in the category of personal essays. This is a person writing about her experiences. She writes about her father’s hospitalization in Greece as a result of alcoholism-related illness, and about her struggles with infertility, and her parents’ divorce and its effect on her childhood, and her ‘wild’ years as an adolescent, and her experiences as a woman in academia — these last two are where there is the most visible effort to make some broader claims about the world, and about sexism and the silencing of women especially. But most of the essays actually don’t generalize much. They’re an account of one person’s life, and what it feels like to experience the things she was experiencing. It is motivated, in part, by the belief that other people have similar experiences, and benefit from knowing that they are not alone — there’s a repeated invocation about the power of speaking out.
Of course, there’s plenty of backlash nowadays against the personal essay and the sharing of individual experience. Perhaps this is why I found the moments where Pine explains why she felt the need to write, or publish these essays somewhat less compelling than the parts where she just described her experiences. Of course, I am also in some sense the most over-determined audience for these essays, as a fellow academic in literary studies who is also a middle-aged woman (it feels odd to apply that label to myself but I think it’s…probably accurate…). So these were right in that sweet spot of life experiences and a perspective that are significantly different from mine, but also not so distant as to be really foreign. But as a result, I also feel sort of unable to comment on them. It’s like, are you interested in hearing this person who is fairly similar to me in a lot of ways describe her life? Are you interested in hearing about the topics she discusses? Then you will probably enjoy this book!
Kasia Reads 