Base Notes in the TLS: The olfactory stations of the cross

James Cook has reviewed Base Notes: The Scents of a Life in this week's Times Literary Supplement (June 13, 2025)

>> Adelle Stripe’s first book was Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile (2017), a novel inspired by the life of the Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar. In her memoir, Base Notes, she recounts her own working-class upbringing in a small northern town in the 1980s, and her eventual escape from a life that seems to have been mapped out for her: marriage, kids, a job in her mother’s hairdressing salon.

Stripe’s mother dominates her younger years (as she does the book). In a marvellously nuanced character study, we get to know a woman who is controlling, com­petitive and materialistic (“all [she] truly desired was an abundance of money, foreign holidays and a nice house”), but also generous, struggling with her weight and frustrated with married life. Her thwarted hopes and dreams recall powerfully those of Alan Bennett’s character Joyce Chilvers in A Private Function (as played by Maggie Smith), only transposed to the 1980s.

It’s the north of the 1980s that Stripe, a great noticer of telling details, perfectly captures. A world of Ford Granadas, “girls with home perms and pink pearl lipstick”, and ice rinks where “Impulse body mist fills the refrigerated air”. An era of Chippendales catalogues displaying men in thongs, which, as her mother wistfully remarks, are not the sort of underwear men wear in this town – it’s more of “a Y-front place”. Stripe feels as lonely and trapped as her mother, who realizes her daughter isn’t turning out as she expected. When Stripe reaches adolescence, her interest in Andy Warhol, men’s suits and big boots confuses her mother. “‘Why can’t you be more like the salon girls?’ she asks … ‘Or at the very least, normal.’”

Continue reading