Base Notes: The Scents of a Life

by Adelle Stripe

A Telegraph Best Book of 2025

'Ingenious' - ★★★★★ Telegraph

'Candid and compelling' - Guardian

'Wistful, sad and funny' - Spectator

'Working-class life pinned to the page' - Herald

'Already your future has been planned out. There is not much choice about what to become in the small town where you live . . .'

A bedroom dreamer with a headful of Warhol, Adelle Stripe's formative years were ones of daytime drinking and religious fervour, frustrated mothers and reckless daughters, desire, ambition and the pursuit of creativity. Told through a prism of vintage perfumes, and played out in vivid detail with startling clarity and colour, Base Notes chronicles an unbridled Northern England of the late 20th century already fading from view.

With a keen eye for the absurd, an ear cocked to eavesdropped conversations and a nose that finds perfume wherever it goes, this tragicomic tale of working-class womanhood is no clichéd story of redemption or escape, but instead a bleakly funny yet unflinching memoir of dead-end jobs, lost weekends, brief encounters and those wild, forgotten characters who slip through the cracks.

Infused with acerbic observations and unexpected poignancy, Base Notes sees Adelle Stripe boldly laying her lived experience on the page, creating literature from a life less ordinary.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

275 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 13, 2025

About the author

Adelle Stripe's books include Base Notes, the Sunday Times bestselling Ten Thousand Apologies, and Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile, a fictionalised biography inspired by the playwright Andrea Dunbar. Her writing has been shortlisted for the Penderyn Music Book Prize, Gordon Burn Prize, and Portico Prize for Literature. She lives in Calderdale, West Yorkshire.

Reviews

[Sharon Tomlinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book and read it in a couple of days.
It’s a frank and honest account of growing up in the north of England. It recalls sexual encounters in a time before women’s voices were heard and the difficulties unwanted advances affect your state of mind.
Each chapter starts with a fragrance that provokes each memory. Definitely recommend this book.

[Kate Cotton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful and evocative memoir of growing up ‘up north’. Although I was a hundred miles or so south, in the West Midlands, and a few years older than Adelle, this chimed massively with me - with the styles, music and attitudes of the 80s and 90s and beyond.

Adelle’s descriptions of her family members, particularly her mum, are fantastically poetic and larger than life. Her narratives on their relationships are raw and honest, and made me cry. A lot. Wonderfully written and highly recommended.

[WndyJW · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am an Adelle Stripe fan, I love her free verse poetry and her memoir/essays, and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile, since I wasn’t familiar with Andrea Dunbar before I read her biography, so I was eager to read this memoir. I knew it would be brilliant, but it exceeded my expectations.

This is an intimate and deeply moving coming of age story about a sensitive, bright, observant girl born in 1976 in a working class neighborhood in northern England, a portrait of a mother daughter relationship with all the small hurts and acts of absolute loyalty and love that will be familiar to most women, and one woman’s struggle to live a creative life.

Adelle tells her own story with courageous candor: a strident, fundamentalist grandmother, a bigger-than-life mother who loved her family, but chafed at the expectations of motherhood, a caring father who spent maybe too much time on farm work, and Adele’s own often misguided, sometimes frighteningly misguided, search for her place in the world.

Olfactory memory is closely linked to emotions and are highly evocative of past experiences: each section starts with the name a perfume or cologne, the elements of the scent, and what the scent connotes. For Adelle these scents bring back memories of sneaking out with her sweet grandfather to escape from her domineering and critical Jehovah’s Witness grandmother for an afternoon during dreaded summer visits; Sundays spent in various ballrooms accompanying her mother on her quest to win the British Hairdressing Championship; a few almost disastrous weeks in NYC by herself; the cast of quirky and creative friends, lovers, roommates, bosses and co-workers she in her reckless twenties; pointless jobs, fun jobs, weird jobs; late night shifts; freezing flats; poverty; and finally reconciliations, college, a PhD, and the handsome writer from Durham.

Fans of Hilary Mantel, Jeannette Winterson, and Douglas Stewart will love this. It is funny, sad, heartbreaking and heartwarming, and brutally honest.

This story will resonate with anyone who has yearned for an authentic and creative life and anyone who has struggled to find their place.

I loved this book and cannot recommend it strongly enough.

[Louise Bentley · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s a lot I love about this book. Start with the form, chapters are short, and run chronologically, from childhood to present day. All named after scents that feature and might be a favourite of a mother, a boyfriend, a grandad. The concept of the scent is what Stripe presents to you in the writing. Its container. You are drawn into a distillation of memory, can imagine the writer sitting and conjuring up the most precious and painful moments and blending them on the page. It’s really, really brilliant.

Now the content, I love working class representation in writing but often I don’t really enjoy it. It grates, it makes me cringe or it worse still tries to teach us a bloody lesson. There is nothing in Base Notes that beats the reader around the head with whippets and dole queues. It is unflinchingly honest in a way that perhaps only a working class reader will recognise? It is a mirror where we have become so used to writing being a window. Genuinely I had to stop for a moment many, many times reading this. Like do I actually know this woman, because I am reading parts of my own life in these pages. That is actual working class representation done flawlessly. Heartbreak and hardship without ‘poor me’, a radical message without soapboxing, a naturally evolving, narrative arc that is inspirational but not sickly sweet. This is beautifully crafted and compelling writing that is also enjoyable.
I need to speak about the perspective. Second person is rare. I’ve read maybe 2 other books that use it and it can jar and be difficult to move into that space you need to occupy as you read. Stripe uses YOU throughout only deviating in her dialogue. I feel that there is something inherently comfortable about this voice and this perspective together and it has to do with reading from a certain state of mind. The kind that is used to adopting others’ rules, being forced to fit into an ideology or narrative that does not match one’s own. I think of it as deeply working class, I hear it in my grandmothers dialect when she would tell a silly story, it is in children’s games of pretend, ‘now you be the teacher’. It is a form of control from one who is used to little. I don’t know that I’ve explained that well but it was an arresting yet fluid form to have used for memoir.
Breathtaking book!

[Gayle Appleyard · Rating 5 out of 5]

A heart breaking, hilarious, fascinating memoir told through the nose - absolutely loved it. There were a couple of moments of shared experiences, written with such accurate visceral observation and authenticity, I had to take a breather. It’s a brilliant book Adelle, you should be so chuffed.x

[Jenny Barron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful read. Relished the construction of this memoir and was thoroughly immersed in Adelle’s many memories of herself and her family. Evocative of northern life, bringing a lot of memories to the surface…

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book. I am the same age as Adelle and grew up in a working class family in the north not far from Tadcaster. The honesty and authenticity with which it is told made me laugh and cry. This is the first book I’ve read by Adelle but will be delving into others.

[Harry Richards · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the quickest I've ever read a book. Struggled to put down once in the hands. Not something I would usually read but had heard a lot about the writer and I thoroughly enjoyed her style. I will be reading more Adelle Stripe!

[lotte langs · Rating 5 out of 5]

“𝒜𝓁𝓇𝑒𝒶𝒹𝓎 𝓎𝑜𝓊𝓇 𝒻𝓊𝓉𝓊𝓇𝑒 𝒽𝒶𝓈 𝒷𝑒𝑒𝓃 𝓅𝓁𝒶𝓃𝓃𝑒𝒹 𝑜𝓊𝓉. 𝒯𝒽𝑒𝓇𝑒 𝒾𝓈 𝓃𝑜𝓉 𝓂𝓊𝒸𝒽 𝒸𝒽𝑜𝒾𝒸𝑒 𝒶𝒷𝑜𝓊𝓉 𝓌𝒽𝒶𝓉 𝓉𝑜 𝒷𝑒𝒸𝑜𝓂𝑒 𝒾𝓃 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓈𝓂𝒶𝓁𝓁 𝓉𝑜𝓌𝓃 𝓌𝒽𝑒𝓇𝑒 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝓁𝒾𝓋𝑒.”

After reading “Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile” I would read anything by Adele Stripe. No one writes about northern working class towns and their funny, gritty and authentic people quite like her.

“Base Notes” is an autobiographical reflection on the authors life with each chapter represented by a particular scent that was “of the time”. The story of a northern, working class girl trying to find her creative true self was somewhat too relateable to me at time, whilst still being a brutally funny read. I laughed and cried 🥲 And to get to the end of the book and see the reflections of a woman living in Calderdale content with her garden really struck a chord with me 🌷

Congratulations Adelle on such a profoundly visceral read. This book will stay with me for a long time 💅🏻

[Emerald Denniss · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a fellow South/West Yorkshire gal with ties to the east coast some of the references had me relating so hard (and creasing mostly). A beautifully honest, darkly funny and hugely relatable book with such a gorgeous, evocative way of talking about nostalgia

[Sarah Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really loved this. Each chapter perfectly rounded with an excerpt of the author's life.
I'm a similar age so many of the experiences and memories really resonated with me, and even the scents and fragrances linked to!
Bravo for such a lovely 'story' and insight into one person's life.

[lara · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellent. for some reason thought this was the autobiography of a famous person but aside from her books she isn't famous at all. which made me love it more.
made me wanna buy more perfume tho

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished in Ireland.

[Esther · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved her book on Andrea Dunbar, so picked up a lovely signed copy at the Salts Mill bookshop earlier this year. This was not what I was expecting in the very best way. This is not some easy nostalgia tome about perfumes. It’s a powerful story of her life told through a dozen or so chapters all based around an evocative scent of that time. Her childhood was difficult full of strong, eccentric characters and strong women. I’d love to meet her in person and compare notes on feral, challenging Gen X childhoods.

[Rick Hamilton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deeply moving, funny, warm and engrossing: I read it in one sitting. The evocative power of scents becomes a starting point for a series of reflections on different life events from childhood to the present day. Some of these are joyful, some are incredibly, unbearably painful. I loved this book.

[Cassandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

It felt awkward to read an autobiography written in second person. Ellipses were used too liberally. It's unclear what the reader is meant to take away from the story of the author's life.