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.
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