‘Already your future has been planned out. There is not much choice about what to become in the small town where you live . . .’
A bedroom dreamer with a headful of Warhol, Adelle Stripe’s formative years were ones of daytime drinking and religious fervour, frustrated mothers and reckless daughters, desire, ambition and the pursuit of creativity. Told through a prism of vintage perfumes, and played out in vivid detail with startling clarity and colour, Base Notes chronicles an unbridled Northern England of the late 20th century already fading from view.
With a keen eye for the absurd, an ear cocked to eavesdropped conversations and a nose that finds perfume wherever it goes, this tragi-comic tale of working-class womanhood is no clichéd story of redemption or escape, but instead a bleakly funny yet unflinching memoir of dead-end jobs, lost weekends, brief encounters and those wild, forgotten characters who slip through the cracks.
Infused with acerbic observations and unexpected poignancy, Base Notes sees Adelle Stripe boldly laying her lived experience on the page, creating literature from a life less ordinary.
A bedroom dreamer with a headful of Warhol, Adelle Stripe’s formative years were ones of daytime drinking and religious fervour, frustrated mothers and reckless daughters, desire, ambition and the pursuit of creativity. Told through a prism of vintage perfumes, and played out in vivid detail with startling clarity and colour, Base Notes chronicles an unbridled Northern England of the late 20th century already fading from view.
With a keen eye for the absurd, an ear cocked to eavesdropped conversations and a nose that finds perfume wherever it goes, this tragi-comic tale of working-class womanhood is no clichéd story of redemption or escape, but instead a bleakly funny yet unflinching memoir of dead-end jobs, lost weekends, brief encounters and those wild, forgotten characters who slip through the cracks.
Infused with acerbic observations and unexpected poignancy, Base Notes sees Adelle Stripe boldly laying her lived experience on the page, creating literature from a life less ordinary.
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Reviews
As the whiff of a past love's perfume takes part of me back to a party in 1979 Adelle's memoir is further proof that through scent time travel is indeed possible for us mortals ... scratch and sniff Proust
They're here - the scents of a life - in all their heady, olfactory intensity. But so too, in its joyous, messy, difficult and gloriously rich reality, is the sense of a life. From ice-rinks to chatlines, leather factories to delivery calves on a Yorkshire farm, Adelle Stripe is alive to love and light, loss and gain, the dark and comic. A marvel of specificity, it's compelling and deeply evocative. Plus, like the best of perfumes, it has a warm and lasting power
Adelle's writing has a rare verve, giving vivid evocations of times, places and scents. It's got both style and warmth and made me cry. I loved this rock and roll spirit coming out of small town Yorkshire
It is powerful and moving to see your own life and the lives of so many you know echoed in Stripe's tender memories, as she tugs on the glistening threads of her family history. Her life becomes a sweet triumph as she weaves those stories together with her own divinely unpredictable adventures. Generations of trauma, and the gimlet humour that often goes with it, are handled with soft elegance, clear sight and endless enduring love. And somehow, through the magic of Stripe's writing, you laugh out loud even more than you cry. This is a beautiful book.
An addictive - frequently devastating - memoir of escape, immolation and reinvention, never better than when observing the various traps of working-class womanhood or being labelled 'a strong northern voice'... told with her now trademark restraint, humour and empathy. A brilliant and singular book.