Adelle Stripe is the author of one novel, Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile (2017), one work of nonfiction, Ten Thousand Apologies (2022) – a biography of the wilfully dysfunctional band Fat White Family – and various short stories in sundry collections. Now the North Yorkshire writer has trained her focus inward with a coming-of-age memoir that recounts the story of growing up with a complex mother and how she herself became a “reckless daughter”. Authors who turn to memoir face certain dilemmas. They must wrestle with precisely how much to reveal and what to conceal; which are the most resonant parts and how to avoid self-indulgence. The best in the genre manage such issues with invisible aplomb, while others can seem like leafing through family photo albums whose pictures mean more to the subject than to anyone else.
The fact that Stripe has elected to write hers in the second person is jarring. Second person can work effectively in fiction, but memoir is all about intimacy, disclosure. “Come in,” she seems to be saying here, “but stay over there. No, further back.”
Her mother runs a hairdressing salon, struggles with her weight and maintains myriad airs and graces. She wants to mould the young Stripe accordingly. “Stop dropping your aitches,” she scolds. “It makes you sound common, like all the rest.”
Not unusually for children of overbearing parents, Stripe considers herself a square peg. Familial deference remains in short supply. When her grandmother, a devout Jehovah’s Witness, tells her that one day God will help her rise from the soil, Stripe responds: “What, like zombies?”
She realises that in order to find herself, first she must get lost. That self-styled “recklessness” is really what the French would call joie de vivre, but Stripe lives in a world where problematical people are everywhere; anything resembling adventure can bring danger. As a young teen, she is sexually assaulted by a footballer after she agrees to his offer of a lift home. Later, in her 20s, she flees to New York intent on staying at the fabled Chelsea hotel, only to find it full, then eagerly takes up the shifty doorman’s offer of his spare room. When his kindness comes with certain conditions, she self-admonishes. “Your fault,” she tells herself. “Your fault.”
Such awful incidents aside, Base Notes mostly describes the fairly typical trajectory of someone establishing their autonomy via leaving home, early jobs, numerous flats and friendships. Many of the more intriguing-sounding memories, though, are skimmed over, like stones on water. Within the space of a single sentence, she announces that “you had fallen pregnant with a man you hardly knew … the lowest ebb”, and reveals nothing more. Elsewhere, there’s the time when “you were flown to a foreign country with a group of strangers for a new experiment called reality TV”. Which programme? What happens? She won’t say. When, late in the book, she announces that she is now “Dr Stripe”, I wondered whether I’d glossed over an earlier throwaway line explaining she’d retrained as a GP, before realising the more likely reason: that her mature-student university course culminated in a doctorate.
Throughout, she relies upon smell to summon up nostalgic remembrance. Her mother is redolent of “basil and bergamot … lemon … peach … oak moss … cyclamen … vetiver … rose”, and walking into a room her nostrils pick up “orange blossom … gardenia … a splash of cedarwood”. It’s when she first meets the writer Benjamin Myers, whom she will later marry, claiming to note whiffs of “pennyroyal tea … golden delicious … buttery sage … sawdust snacks … freshly torn basil”, that it becomes clear she doesn’t actually possess an olfactory awareness to rival Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, but simply enjoys rococo flourishes.
Nevertheless, there is some lovely, tender writing here, about how confusing life can be, and how meandering the path before, in this case, “you” finally find peace. What starts out as a rail against family shackles becomes, ultimately, a fond tribute. “A slow acceptance of your differences have emerged,” she writes, her mother at last accepting that Stripe – married, middle-aged, happily child-free – is her own person. “Now that 264 miles separate you, your chalk and cheese characters are hardly noticeable. You are finally able to enjoy each other’s company. An entente cordiale has been reached.”
Base Notes: The Scents of a Life by Adelle Stripe is published by White Rabbit (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
