‘Smell is one of the most neglected senses’: Yorkshire author Adelle Stripe on her new scent-inspired memoir

“There's an art to it, like anything," says Stripe, speaking from her home in Calderdale.

“I put all this time and effort into crafting this perfume that I thought would be an absolute work of art. Well, it wasn't. You can’t just stick everything together and hope it's going to smell nice when all the chemicals mix, you have to know what you’re doing.”

Both a journalist and writer, Stripe has previously explored topics including Yorkshire playwright Andrea Dunbar and cult UK band Fat White Family. For her new book, however, Stripe turns her creative lens on herself, breaking down her life into a series of scent-informed vignettes which chronicle her childhood in West Yorkshire, as well as times in Edinburgh, New York, and eventually France.

It was in France that she was to create the scent which she now finds on her hands, and despite her lack of success as a perfumer, the fragrance will be used to adorn bookmarks given away with the special edition of her latest release – Base Notes: The Scents of a Life.

“The stories in this book have been badgering me for 20 years,” says Stripe. “Some of them I have been writing on and off for years, and some have appeared as poems or flash fiction or fragmentary pieces – some of the chapters were even failed novels.

“In a way, I’ve been trying to find a way to bring this material together for a long time, living with these stories and trying to work out how I might put them in a book. To start with, I went back to this idea of trying to write about my mother’s hairdressing salon in the ‘80s. I thought about sitting in the waiting room, watching everyone have their hair done and reading magazines.

“I was completely obsessed with glossy fashion magazines, and when you opened them, they had scented perfume strips inside. What was really magical about it was when you looked at the perfume adverts in there, they were just these fantasy worlds that were a million miles from drab old Tadcaster.”

Each chapter in Base Notes takes the name of a perfume or aftershave evocative of a certain time in Stripe’s life, each featuring opening statements in which she reimagines their advertising campaigns. Within these statements, lies the history of how the book came to be.

“The beginning of each chapter of Base Notes has these mock advertising copylines that I wrote, trying to imagine another version, in my own imagination, of what that perfume is,” says Stripe. “As a journalist, I was interested in the history of these fragrances, how they came into being, who designed them and where they were made, so to start with I wrote journalistic features on each one.

“I then started writing these little memoir pieces going under each fragrance, and what I realised was that the memoir was actually the interesting part. I think if you’re telling the story of a life, there needs to be a way in, you can't just write everything that ever happened. The best memoirs are the ones that have some kind of focus. It can be anything, the football games you played when you were a kid, the gigs you went to, it's just about getting an angle. To me, perfume was the natural angle to tell this story.”

The narrative of the book, Stripe notes, does not follow her life exactly, but uses creative non-fiction to re-tell certain moments. It’s an absolute embellishment of the truth,” she says. “All I can really remember are particular details, but I can't tell them exactly. I think to write something like this, you have to come up with the truth you want to tell about a situation and a time, and use biography as a framework to tell that.”

Stripe also used a similar approach for her 2017 book, Black Teeth and Brilliant Smile, a literary portrayal of Bradford-born Andrea Dunbar, in which Stripe used a cast of real and imagined characters to tell the story of Dunbar. To coincide both with Stripe’s new book and Bradford’s 2025 City of Culture celebrations, the book is this month set to be re-released featuring a new foreword by Stripe.

Stripe’s choice to use smell as a catalyst for her latest book was also informed by her research into perfumes.

“I dug into the scientific side of perfumery, and did a lot of reading around why smell is so important to us, but also why it is one of the most neglected senses,” she says “The olfactory bulbs, which process information about smells, are located very close to where memory is held, and scientists think that is why smell is so evocative for us. It just gives you that immediate transportation. It can be a really bad aftershave or a cheap high street perfume, but someone can walk past you on the street and you immediately think ‘that was what my first boyfriend used to wear,’ or ‘my best friend wore that when we used to go out clubbing.’ It’s that kind of experience, and we all have reactions to certain perfumes, they will always take us to another place.”

One of the places Stripe is taken to in her story, is 1980s Tadcaster.

In a chapter framed by Jean Paul Gaultier’s Le Male – the scent her then-boyfriend wore – she explores the culture and enigmatic characters of the town in which she spent her late teenage years.

“Tadcaster is quite an isolated place, but it has its own mythology and people who are famous in the town,” she says. “It wasn’t until I started to become a writer that I realised I could write about those myths and legends and people. There was one man my dad used to work with, and he would have 25 pints every day. He used to deliver the beer, and he would have one pint at every stop, then he would have four fried breakfasts every morning, and he was like a man mountain. My dad would talk about him all the time. When you say that to people from other towns, they don't believe you, they think you’re exaggerating, but in Tadcaster, it's how things were.”

Though many of the stories Stripe tells in Base Notes are harrowing – looking at some of the darkest moments in her past – the process of writing, she says, was also cathartic.

“Writing has been a really wonderful process of enlightenment as a human, because you hold on to things so much when you don’t have a way of expressing yourself,” she says. “I wouldn't have thought when I was a child or a teenager that I would have been doing what I'm doing now, I couldn't even imagine myself being a writer or having this kind of way of expressing myself.

“I hope people take away from the book that the things that happen in your childhood and teenage years, you don't have to let them define you. You can create a life for yourself, and not let those events stop you from leading a fulfilled and creative life.”

Base Notes is published by White Rabbit and Adelle Stripe is currently on tour in the UK including Book Tree, Pickering, on 20 February and Kemps Bookshop in Wetherby,on 22 February.