Emilie Pine, 41, is an associate professor of modern drama at University College, Dublin. Notes to Self, her first non-academic book, is a personal, courageous and compulsively readable collection of essays about what it is to be a woman; it explores taboo subjects – infertility, miscarriage, menstruation, self-starvation, the rape she experienced as a teenager and the effects of alcoholism in a family.

Your book begins with a gripping account of your alcoholic father who is suffering liver failure in an under-staffed Greek hospital. You and your sister have to improvise as his nurses.
My dad got sick in 2013 – a year of hospitals. The good news is that he is still alive and no longer drinking. But in 2014, I felt the need to get it all out of my head. You know that feeling – a crisis is over, yet it is not over because you’re still experiencing the emotional fallout? I wrote a journal, printed out the pages symbolically, put them in a drawer.

Then my partner, who is a writer – and great reader – stumbled across them. He read the top sheets, asked what they were and what I was going to do with them. I said: leave them in the drawer, obviously. He said it was maybe the best thing I had written. I thought about it for two years before sending it to Tramp Press [the collection’s original Irish publisher]. I knew they didn’t publish non-fiction but wanted their opinion. A couple of months later, they asked, on the basis of 8,000 words, if I had a book. I said: “What would I write about?” They said: “Anything you like.”

Women sometimes feel the need to be given permission to treat their emotions and lives as important. It was like being given this massive permission slip. I sat on the bus, on the way home – all the glamour! – and had a random piece of paper – because I believe in paper – and scribbled down five ideas, which became the other essays in this book.

How much is the opening essay chafing against the way family love can turn into onerous duty?
In the case of loving an addict, it is hugely complicated by decades of emotional abuse. It is one thing to care for a parent who has cared for you; it is quite another to care for a parent who has been selfish and extremely hurtful for decades.

It was one of the things I was most ashamed of admitting in the book: the points where I thought, am I going to do this? I decided it would do more harm to me to walk away. You constantly have to think about where you set boundaries. An addict will always violate those boundaries and you feel like a bad person for enforcing them.

To what extent has your life been marked by your father’s alcoholism?
From start to finish. I grew up adoring my dad, wanting to be my dad because he was always larger than life. But, even as a very young child, I knew not to rely on him. The way my mother brought us up has made me probably fiercer than I needed to be about emotional and financial independence and not allowing oneself to be vulnerable.

Speaking of vulnerability, why, as you make clear, is it so hard for some women to take care of themselves?
Did we even use the term “self-care” two years ago? It is now bandied about and is not synonymous with taking baths, manicures, going on mini-breaks. So many stories in Notes to Self are about not having a vocabulary to deal with depression – not being able to admit, recognise or address it. I’ve been amazed by the number of outwardly successful, stable, happy women who have been in touch with me about this.

One successful journalist told me that she sometimes cannot get out of bed because she hates herself so much. Men can fall into this bracket too. For example, there is an incredibly important new memoir by Arnold Thomas Fanning, published by Penguin, called Mind on Fire – about living with and recovering from bipolar disease. Reading his and my book together might be an interesting project about the different ways in which vulnerability manifests itself.

What response have you had to your essay on the sexual violence you experienced as a teenager?
Writing that essay was incredibly distressing because I had to re-experience the emotions of it. But many women have been in touch saying: exactly the same thing happened to me – because I was raped by someone I knew and not beaten up, I did not class it as rape.

You describe your infertility as a “particular kind of loneliness”…
I wrote the essay I needed to read. I didn’t feel I had anybody to talk to aside from my partner about what we were going through and felt completely isolated. That is partly because others do not share their experiences – except on websites. The chat form can feel like solidarity but you don’t know the people or their backstories and they suddenly disappear and you don’t know why.Loneliness is imposed from outside and from within. We feel we cannot talk about those experiences partly for valid reasons, because they are so emotionally charged, but also for reasons to do with failure and shame.

What books are on your bedside table?
I’ve just finished proof copies of two great essay collections out in March: Sinéad Gleeson’s Constellations (Picador) and Minor Monuments by Ian Maleney (Tramp).

Which classic novel are you most ashamed not to have read?
Middlemarch… – although I watched the TV series. A few years ago, I read that 95% of the books being read were published in the last five years and felt badly for books published more than five years ago so deliberately set out to read more distantly published books – for instance all of Muriel Spark.

Who is your favourite female character in literature?
Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, largely for her mantra “I won’t think about that now, I’ll think about it tomorrow”, and her survivalist spirit. I was 12 when I first read it.

You describe yourself as workaholic. Is that as harmful as being an alcoholic?
No – but it is not conducive to your mental health or the happiness of those around you. The work culture we now exist in is one where not being a workaholic is incredibly difficult. If I don’t check emails at weekends, it is seen as suspect. I love being in my forties, I don’t want to go back, I love my life and see that continuing but am still an over-worker. I constantly have epiphanies about this. Walking down the street the other day I thought: I’m missing my actual life.

Are you nervous about how your book will be received here?
It is overwhelming because there is a risk for me in putting it into the world. But I’m hoping my story’s very ordinariness makes it worthy of being heard and that it might encourage others to tell their stories or to feel less alone.

• Notes to Self by Emilie Pine is published by Penguin (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.43 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99