Judith Turner-Yamamoto's Blog
June 4, 2022
Revisiting Olive Kitteridge
I read this novel in 2008 when it first came out. I recently picked it up again--in the book exchange in the laundry room of my building, of all places.
A book meets you where you are, and I find these characters finding and moving me anew, in a reflective place, taking measure of the past in all its layered and nuanced complexities.
Olive Kitteridge
Writing simply does not get better than Elizabeth Strout, an author who fulfills fiction's truest gift--to know the soul of another.
A book meets you where you are, and I find these characters finding and moving me anew, in a reflective place, taking measure of the past in all its layered and nuanced complexities.
Olive Kitteridge
Writing simply does not get better than Elizabeth Strout, an author who fulfills fiction's truest gift--to know the soul of another.
May 22, 2022
DO YOU TABU? Characters and the Power of Aspirational Scents
“A perfume is more than an extraction: it is a presence in abstraction.”
-Giorgio Armani
In what author Tessa Hadley calls “the improvised, uncertain phase of youth,” fragrance can signal not only who we imagine ourselves to be but who we dream we can become. Seventeen and eager to escape the confines of the small southern mill town where I grew up, I attached myself to the promise of Bigarade. Fraiche et Pimpante-- spirited and young --read the ad for the fragrance against a wash of color the bold hue of blood oranges. The scent held a contradiction, much like the young girl that chose it: the bitter unexpected moss colliding and competing with the direct scent of citrus. Slightly floral and acidic, but also sweet and round.
When I gave a signature scent to Darlene, the fiery red-haired seventeen-year-old widow in my debut novel, Loving the Dead and Gone, I chose Tabu. Created in 1932 by Jean Carles for the house of Dana, the perfumer was instructed to ‘make a fragrance for a whore.’ The result is a tangle of exuberant flowers like jasmine and narcissus, secreted with explosive layers of amber, resins, civet, sandalwood, and patchouli.
Hardwired to the brain’s limbic system, scent can bring back a moment in time with startling clarity. Darlene is an outsized character with a shocking edge and flamboyance that defies the crushing limits of her small-town life. Tabu alone speaks for her in the pivotal sceneLoving the Dead and Gone when an unfaithful husband realizes he’s been in love with a fantasy, and his wife’s suspicions of his infidelity are olfactorily confirmed:
“When Emogene took the lid off that dusting powder Berta Mae’s world fell back in and exploded again. The opening of the powder was like the top of her head being ripped off. All the hunting, fishing, and boating trips of the last year marched past her. Right up the road was the reason her husband hadn’t touched her in longer than she could remember. The scent Berta Mae recognized from Clayton had overwhelmed
the kitchen. It was the one she had trained herself to ignore, to put off on imagination, until finally, she stopped noticing, making a coward’s truce with the calamity of her marriage.”
DO YOU TABU? Tell me about the fragrance and the moments that defined and inspired your personal journey.
Loving the Dead and Gone
-Giorgio Armani
In what author Tessa Hadley calls “the improvised, uncertain phase of youth,” fragrance can signal not only who we imagine ourselves to be but who we dream we can become. Seventeen and eager to escape the confines of the small southern mill town where I grew up, I attached myself to the promise of Bigarade. Fraiche et Pimpante-- spirited and young --read the ad for the fragrance against a wash of color the bold hue of blood oranges. The scent held a contradiction, much like the young girl that chose it: the bitter unexpected moss colliding and competing with the direct scent of citrus. Slightly floral and acidic, but also sweet and round.
When I gave a signature scent to Darlene, the fiery red-haired seventeen-year-old widow in my debut novel, Loving the Dead and Gone, I chose Tabu. Created in 1932 by Jean Carles for the house of Dana, the perfumer was instructed to ‘make a fragrance for a whore.’ The result is a tangle of exuberant flowers like jasmine and narcissus, secreted with explosive layers of amber, resins, civet, sandalwood, and patchouli.
Hardwired to the brain’s limbic system, scent can bring back a moment in time with startling clarity. Darlene is an outsized character with a shocking edge and flamboyance that defies the crushing limits of her small-town life. Tabu alone speaks for her in the pivotal sceneLoving the Dead and Gone when an unfaithful husband realizes he’s been in love with a fantasy, and his wife’s suspicions of his infidelity are olfactorily confirmed:
“When Emogene took the lid off that dusting powder Berta Mae’s world fell back in and exploded again. The opening of the powder was like the top of her head being ripped off. All the hunting, fishing, and boating trips of the last year marched past her. Right up the road was the reason her husband hadn’t touched her in longer than she could remember. The scent Berta Mae recognized from Clayton had overwhelmed
the kitchen. It was the one she had trained herself to ignore, to put off on imagination, until finally, she stopped noticing, making a coward’s truce with the calamity of her marriage.”
DO YOU TABU? Tell me about the fragrance and the moments that defined and inspired your personal journey.
Loving the Dead and Gone
