Base Notes chronicles a pre-internet smalltown England of the 1980s and 90s already fading from view. Here memories are triggered by perfumes and their aspirational advertising campaigns, the scenes from Adelle Stripe’s adolescence and young adulthood Proustian in their poetic scale and universality, but born out of a droll comedic tradition too.
At its centre are the fraught relationships between mothers and firstborn daughters who discover they harbour vastly differing ambitions and desires. A bedroom dreamer with a headful of Andy Warhol, Stripe’s is a universe of daytime drinking and religious fervour, low-income Tories and workaholic farmers, everyday sexual predators and smalltown suicides, late night chatlines and morning frost on curtainless windows. But it is also gloriously, unapologetically alive – like Elena Ferrante in Thatcher’s Britain or a Billy Liar who finally gets on the train.
With a keen eye for the absurd, an ear cocked to eavesdropped conversation and a nose that finds perfume wherever it goes, Stripe swerves sentimentality as she journeys to London, New York and beyond. This is no cliched story of redemption and escape though, but rather a big-hearted tragi-comic exploration of family ties and the pursuit of creativity.
Base Notes sees Adelle Stripe boldly laying her lived experience on the page, creating literature out of a life less ordinary.
At its centre are the fraught relationships between mothers and firstborn daughters who discover they harbour vastly differing ambitions and desires. A bedroom dreamer with a headful of Andy Warhol, Stripe’s is a universe of daytime drinking and religious fervour, low-income Tories and workaholic farmers, everyday sexual predators and smalltown suicides, late night chatlines and morning frost on curtainless windows. But it is also gloriously, unapologetically alive – like Elena Ferrante in Thatcher’s Britain or a Billy Liar who finally gets on the train.
With a keen eye for the absurd, an ear cocked to eavesdropped conversation and a nose that finds perfume wherever it goes, Stripe swerves sentimentality as she journeys to London, New York and beyond. This is no cliched story of redemption and escape though, but rather a big-hearted tragi-comic exploration of family ties and the pursuit of creativity.
Base Notes sees Adelle Stripe boldly laying her lived experience on the page, creating literature out of a life less ordinary.
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Reviews
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
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
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.