There’s a popular column in New York magazine’s the Cut called Sex Diaries, which features first-person accounts by people who are having sex: rarely monogamous, often wrapped in infidelity, always salacious and intimate.
As I read Anna Dorn’s third novel, Perfume and Pain, I couldn’t help thinking that it would make a fantastic Sex Diary. Revolving around Astrid Dahl, a semi-successful writer forever on the brink of a breakdown, the novel is an homage to 1950s lesbian pulp fiction, down to the most revealing details.
As the book begins, Astrid has nearly been canceled after using a homophobic slur at a public event. In her Eagle Rock bungalow, she hides out and attempts to get sober—her poison of choice is a drug-and-alcohol cocktail she calls the Patricia Highsmith—while also avoiding the Hollywood movie starlet who wants to buy the rights to one of her novels. Flickering at the edges of Astrid’s consciousness are potential lovers and foes: a new neighbor who bakes cakes for an old girlfriend, a sexy grad student in her Zoom writing group, an ex who is zeroed in on every detail of Los Angeles lesbian gossip. Astrid promises her agent that this time she’ll stay sober, stay offline, and stay away from women.
The agent, of course, has heard it all before.
Dorn is a deft observer of millennial women, like herself, in Los Angeles, but what sets her work apart is her interest in specific slices of pop culture. In her debut novel, Vagablonde, she wrote about a white woman trying to make it in rap music; in her second, Exalted, she turned to astrology culture and Instagram. Here, it’s pulp: erotic and illicit, and Dorn is clever and innovative in the tropes that she invokes. Her knowledge is extensive and nuanced, infusing her portrayals of both Astrid and one of her trysting partners, a PhD student named Ivy, who is studying the genre. Throughout the novel, Dorn references specific books—many of them long out of print—and offers glimpses of both their history and the way they have come to be regarded in contemporary culture.
Astrid’s favorite is Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, although Dorn’s novel takes its title from another actual book, Perfume and Pain by Kimberly Kemp. (Ironically, we learn, Kimberly Kemp is a pseudonym for a male writer named Gilbert Fox.) Astrid recalls encountering one such novel in a hookup’s bathroom: “The cover depicted a MILF type gazing lustily at a teenage blonde and I remember being envious of the blonde, wanting to be looked at that way by a sexy brunette woman twice my age.”
Throughout Perfume and Pain, Dorn treats us to the history of lesbian dominant culture, tracing a clean line from Sappho to The L Word to Kristen Stewart. Astrid has thoughts on all of them: aspirational, overrated, sexy, basic. She is opinionated and bound for chaos, which has no trouble finding her. In the space of the novel, she gets caught in a love triangle, falls for an enemy, revisits the one who got away, and is hit on by a celebrity. That the book avoids cringiness—or perhaps, embraces it to the point of surpassing it—is a testament to Dorn’s confidence as a writer. Her characters are fully developed and completely themselves, bold even in their neuroses.
In an interview with a queer literary journal, Astrid describes what she’s after. “I’m primarily concerned with writing stories that make women proud to love women instead of ashamed,” she says. It’s an odd statement from a woman whose own escapades often seem to derail her emotional stability and lead her into relapse, but at the same time, shame is largely absent from the book. “I want to remind lesbians it’s okay to revel in the feminine, to be frivolous, submissive, a brat,” Astrid continues. “That we can be sexy and glamorous, and in fact, we’ve always been sexy and glamorous. That Sappho, and Marie Antoinette, and Virginia Wolff, and Patricia Highsmith were all dimes.”
Here we see the idea that sits at the center of Dorn’s novel: that women can love (and have loved) women in all their iterations, and that this can be messy and sparkling and devilish, often all at the same time. These love stories can be marked by a similar intrigue and desire as that of other relationships and their not infrequently disastrous storylines.•
Jessica Blough is a freelance writer. A former associate editor at Alta Journal, Blough is a graduate of Tufts University where she was editor in chief of the Tufts Daily.
