Reviewing Emilie Pine’s “Notes to Self” in The Irish Times, Martina Evans wrote: “It’s the kind of book you want to give to everyone, especially young women and men, so that we can learn together to take ourselves and each other more seriously.”

A lot of readers must have taken her advice, because the essay collection became the No. 1 best-selling book in Ireland, where Pine is an associate professor of modern drama at University College Dublin. Pine had written academic books before, but the subject matter and the perspective in “Notes to Self” were a radical departure. She writes in these six essays about the effect of her father’s alcoholism on her family, her unsuccessful attempts to have a baby, menstruation, body image and sexual violence. Her tone is both frank and measured, confessional and confidently self-contained. Below, Pine talks about the “volcanic pressure” she felt to write these things, her surprising connections with readers and more.

When did you first get the idea to write this book?

My father, who had been an alcoholic all my life, went into liver failure in 2013. He was in intensive care and spent a year in and out of the hospital. In 2014, when it became apparent he was actually going to live, I still had a lot of crazy emotions going around in my head, so I wrote them down, just in a journal to myself. My partner found it and said, “There’s something here.” It took me two years to get up the courage to send it to a publisher in Ireland, and they commissioned a book out of it. There was this moment when they asked if I could write a book, and I simultaneously thought: Yes and no.

But I was being given this incredible permission. And I was being told I had a style and a voice, words I would never have used about myself. On the bus on the way home from that meeting, I wrote down five ideas on the back of my bus ticket — that’s part of the joke of the title, I write on every scrap of paper available — and those five ideas became the five other essays, and I didn’t really deviate from that.