After publishing a book of personal essays (Everything I Can't Say in Random House, Apunts personals in L'Altra) in which she wrote about her relationship with an alcoholic father and an episode of sexual violence, among other life shocks, and that It was a surprise success, everyone expected Emilie Pine (Dublin, 1977) to continue with non-fiction. Even she herself expected it.
She accepted a residency at the Maternity Hospital in Dublin, her hometown, and spent six months interviewing staff and patients for what was to be a large book of many voices about a place that terrified her – where her niece and daughter were born and died. She was treated there after suffering a spontaneous abortion, as she explained in Of the Baby Years, one of the essays in her first book, but what continually appeared was a voice that told her: now the novel.
The novel, Ruth and Pen, ended up materializing, it has just been published in Spanish by Random House, translated by Laura Salas Rodríguez. These two women, Ruth, a 43-year-old therapist, who believes her marriage is about to fall apart, and Pen, a 16-year-old autistic teenager who is dramatically in love with her best friend, take a walk through Dublin, pass each other and carry with them also much that cannot be said.
Anyone who has read Pine's essay about frustrated motherhood will immediately recognize the territory in which Ruth moves. Her story diverges from that of Emilie herself. The author explained in her first book how she gave up after years of trying to be a mother and decided, together with her boyfriend, not to try in vitro fertilization treatment, partly for fear of destroying their marriage, which is what they had seen around them. and what also happens to Ruth and her partner, Aidan.
“I still think we made the right decision, but there is a part of my brain that will always think: what if we had kept trying? Ruth and Aidan do several IVF cycles, she becomes pregnant but loses the baby. For me, it was a way to emotionally explore what could have happened to us," explains Pine in a place that is nothing like the settings of her novel, the suite of a hotel in Magaluf, where she went a few weeks ago as a guest at the FLEM, the Expanded Literature Festival that is altering the image of the town that until now had the worst press in the Balearic Islands. There, in a suite with a terrace, Pine continues pulling the thread of her first novel and the reverberations in her own life.
“It was very important for me to also include Aidan, who doesn't look like my partner. In fact he is more of a projection of myself. I know many men who wanted to be fathers, even more than their wives, in part because it wasn't going to be their body that suffered, but they are not expected to tell these stories. At the Maternal Hospital I discovered that single fathers do not even have access to therapy for pregnancy loss, only if they accompany the mothers.” In the novel, Aidan is in London, on a work trip that he plans to extend because he doesn't feel like returning home. Without revealing the ending, it can be said that the author wrote the novel wanting them both to stay together, as if they were a pair of neighbors or acquaintances, even though they are already at a point where they have left each other emotionally.
Just as, in his first exercise as a novelist, he was not sure what was going to happen with that couple, he also did not know that his other protagonist, Pen, was autistic until well into the writing process. "I remember saying it to my sister: 'I think my character is on the autism spectrum.' And she, who is a very rational person, told me: 'What do you think? You're making it up.' But she doesn't work like that.” In her subconscious there was, she senses, her godson, also autistic, and the mother of that child, one of her best friends, who told her that she never saw people like her son well reflected in life. fiction. That's why she decided to also give it a romantic plot, because it is not the most common thing when there are neurodivergent characters in fiction. To ensure he reflected Pen well, Pine did a lot of research, read novels written by people diagnosed on the autism spectrum, listened to podcasts and joined various social media groups. Finally, she gave her manuscript to read by an actress and playwright, Jodie O'Neill, who herself was diagnosed as an adult and is also the mother of an autistic girl. O'Neill told her that she had captured Pen very well but that there were too many paragraphs of almost scientific description of how autism works. If she eliminated the theory, the person would remain.
And Pine decided to listen to him. Isn't that a practical example of the famous “sensitivity readings” that generate so much debate in the publishing world? This is the name given to the specific edition that is made of a text to detect possible offenses to minority groups. The Irish author brings it up herself before we can. “Sensitivity readings are a hot topic right now. I see it more as an expert reading. She is autistic, I am not. Why shouldn't I listen to it? A writer is not a god.” “Recently,” she adds, “I heard a writer, a heterosexual man, lament because he had been forced to have a sensitivity reader test a character who was a lesbian woman. He is also a middle class person and all of his characters are working class. I find it curious that only some experiences are considered foreign.”
Pine, who is a professor of Dramaturgy at University College Dublin, has joined with these two titles to a literary panorama, the Irish one, that shows signs of excellent vitality. In fact, at the faculty she shares a department with a veteran in top form, Anne Enright. And in the last list of shortlists for the Booker, the most important prize in Anglo-Saxon literature, it was striking that four of the 13 finalists were Irish, a disproportionate representation for a country of barely five million inhabitants that competes in that contest with United States, United Kingdom and Australia among others. That's without going into the Sally Rooney phenomenon, which has swept up other young authors like Naoise Dolan. “And we all know each other,” jokes the author. “It's a small country, Dublin is even smaller, and we're almost all around 40.” “What is true – she clarifies – is that there are new labels, many of them founded by women, that are breaking new ground. I benefited from that, and so have other writers I love, like Dorieann Ní Ghriofa.” The latter published a few months ago A ghost in the throat (Sexto Piso).
Although they are very diverse authors, reading their essays and novels it is easy to get the idea of the upheaval that the country has experienced in the last 20 years, something that Emilie Pine's books also reflect. “When I went to school, which was Catholic because there were hardly any non-Catholic schools, although my family is Protestant, divorce was illegal in Ireland. In the entire school only one other child and I had separated parents. And there was that constant social message, which I don't believe in, that parents had to stay together for the good of their children.” So, in homage to her mother and her sister, another estranged mother, she gave Pen a perfectly functional family with a mother at the helm. The referendum for the legalization of abortion also appears, which was held in 2018. She was very involved in the yes campaign and even bought tickets to go to France on the day of the vote, because she couldn't stand the idea of being in Ireland if she won. he does not. As she explained in her first book, when the baby she was carrying lost a fetal heartbeat, she was forced to carry him inside for two more weeks, because the law then prevented the removal of a lifeless fetus. That week, one of her students at her university wrote her an email that still moves her: “I voted for you.”
