Every so often, I’m prompted to do a literature-adjacent project that (happily) sends me down rabbit holes. The podcast Once Upon a Time… at Bennington College started one, and this summer, Anna Dorn’s Perfume & Pain has started another. It’s a television-related rabbit hole.

It’s no secret that I have no standards when it comes television. Reality TV? Dish me up. True crime doco? Sure. SBS subtitled drama, seemingly filmed without lighting? Yep, I’ll watch that. I’m unapologetic about the fact that I will enjoy an episode of Love Island as much as Deutschland 83, and Succession as much as Derry Girls. I mention this because halfway through Perfume & Pain, I realised that I had to watch all six seasons of the 2004 drama series, The L Word, to grasp Dorn’s pop-culture-lesbian references.

The story is about moderately successful author Astrid Dahl, whose career faltered after an incident (at a book reading) that left her ‘lightly canceled’. Determined to revive her career, she finds herself back in the Zoom writer’s group she co-founded, Sapphic Scribes, where she becomes immediately distracted by Ivy, a grad student who is researching 1950s lesbian pulp.

On her first day, when Ivy says she’s writing about a lesbian love triangle, I know I’m doomed. When she sends me a private message asking me my zodiac sign, it’s game over.

Between wooing Ivy and dodging her agent, Astrid also has to move house, to a tiny bungalow with an irritating neighbour, Penelope, who, to Astrid’s horror, smells like patchouli (as the title suggests, Astrid is obsessed with fragrances).

When Astrid learns that one of her novels has been optioned by an actress’s vanity-project-production-company, the pressure causes her to turn to her old vice, dubbed the ‘Patricia Highsmith’ – a ‘…magic cocktail … Alcohol, satvia. Adderall, cigarettes.’ Needless to say, you don’t bounce out of bed after a night on the Patricia Highsmiths. So just as things are starting to get back on track, Astrid self-sabotages. I couldn’t look away.

This book made me laugh. I mean really, really laugh.

My hair is behaving, looking more lioness than mental patient – it often toes this line.

It doesn’t try to be more than the gloriously pink cover promises but, if you are across the pop-culture references, I’m sure there are additional layers that could be read into this story (I am au fait with the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Grey Gardens, and The Price of Salt, and I will get there with the other layers because I already have so many thoughts about Bette and Tina; and I’ve listened to all the Cat Power songs mentioned; and I’ve reignited my Bennington Project because coincidentally Astrid does a deep-dive into The Secret History; and I’ve discovered that the world of perfume reviews is serious business).

At the time I was really into Danielle [Steel], not that I read her or anything, I just loved the idea of her – a California-based romance novelist famous for her massive commercial success and resounding lack of critical acclaim.

For the record, Dorn has stated that The L Word has probably ‘aged horribly’ but significantly, it didn’t have a political agenda at the time. It was a show about how ‘…women can be hot and glamorous and have sex and be melodramatic and have all these crazy dramatic relationships. It’s a soap opera…‘ Perfume & Pain is Dorn’s response to a lot of queer female media being ‘…PC to the point of being sanitized, boring, and preachy.‘ She goes on to say that lesbian pulp as a framing device was useful because ‘…it’s problematic, it’s sexy, and it’s fun‘. The character of Ivy says –

“I always felt pretty alienated by lesbian culture. Softball and Home Depot and all that. Benevolent butches like Ellen DeGeneres. Hippie freaks like my mom. It wasn’t sexy.”
I nod. I’ve also struggled with the disconnect between women – sensual, complex, intuitive – and lesbian culture – moralistic, corny, sexless.

Perfume & Pain is melodramatic, indulgent, and gossipy. The characters are all slightly extreme (or ‘extra’, as kids say now). And it’s all terrific. I couldn’t get enough. Astrid sums herself up when reflecting on her own reading preferences –

…I realized I liked books about angry, quick-witted women with major interpersonal issues, a genre known on Goodreads as ‘she’s not doing okay at all.’ I also enjoy deception, glamour, à la Ripley. And anything that compares itself to Single White Female. I love a stalker, even when I’m the victim – it’s flattering!

And more about herself when ordering multiple perfume samples –

…I can’t commit to one scent, which is probably a metaphor, but anyway I’ve told them I want to smell like a Parisian It Girl and sequoia trees at dusk, like Kate Moss in the 90s and a Malibu cloud. I’m dying to find a signature scent, one that transforms me into the perfect version of myself, a scent that people come to associate with me, the new me: who is healthy and lucid and doesn’t black out large portions of their evening on a regular basis.

I’ve not mentioned the supporting characters – friends Zev and Otto, her brother Felix, and of course Penelope, Ivy, her agent and a few exes. Each is exceptionally well done and Astrid’s interactions with each of them reveal a little more about her. The dexterity with which this is done demonstrates Dorn’s strength as a writer (we are relational creatures, after all).

I’m creating a new Goodreads shelf called ‘she’s not doing okay at all’ and Perfume & Pain will be the headliner. It will be a hard act to follow.

4.5/5

The waiter brings our Diet Cokes. This time last year, they would have been margaritas, or Bloody Marys, or champagne. But Otto is sober now, and I’m sober-adjacent. Ever since I turned thirty-five I’ve felt fifty. Thirty-four was twenty-seven and and thirty-five is fifty. Standard mathematical principles can’t account for such phenomena.