On Being Seen

Radically honest and fiercely intelligent, On Being Seen is the exceptional new book from the author of Notes to Self When Emilie Pine’s debut essay collection, the fiercely candid Notes to Self, was first published, she didn’t imagine herself as someone breaking a silence. She only knew that she was breaking a fiction – a fiction that she had never been a victim. Revealing and reflecting on the taboos around female bodies and female pain, Notes to Self was a liberation in the form of memoir – but it wasn’t the end of the story. In this exhilarating follow-up collection, Emilie Pine once again faces up to the seemingly unsayable, asking what it means to live in, and to resist, a culture steeped in violence against women. She writes about the vulnerabilities of travelling alone; about finding your voice and what it takes to leave a controlling partner; about what it means to witness trauma, in life and in art; about good sex and bad; about intimacy and its opposites; about love and loss, luck and risk – and, ultimately, about the surprise and delight of finally feeling at home in your own skin. Honest, angry and vulnerable, Emilie Pine is a writer whose words draw all our lives into sharper focus.