In recent times, the Irish literary arena has witnessed an
extraordinary flourishing of women’s life writing, with a special
interest in the examination of the female body. These works
explore the relations between identity, memoir, and narration
through the confessional, and reconceptualise the female body in
the Irish context. This article sets out to examine collections of
essays by two of these women writers, Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self
(2019) and Sinéad Gleeson’s Constellations: Reflections from Life
(2019), as innovative explorations of identity by applying Michael
Bamberg’s integrative approach of narrative analysis. It aims to
illuminate these examples of essayism as ‘interactional and bodily
performed’ narratives, in Bamberg’s words, and as testimonies of
transformation and adaptation of the body-mediated selves not
only in Ireland, but universally. Pine and Gleeson’s essays look
back on painful past experiences and explore the intersection of
identity, textuality, and the body.
