Paperback of the week: Base Notes by Adelle Stripe

Adelle Stripe grew up on what she calls the boring side of the Pennines, in the brewery town of Tadcaster, where “the only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth”. Her mum was a hairdresser who regularly took part in competitions, making Stripe one of the “lost children of hairdressing, those who wander between towns and cities on the ‘circuit’”. Her father was a cowman, who in a memorable scene enlists his teenage daughter’s help in delivering an oversized calf. “What if we can’t get it out?” Stripe asks him. “What happens then?”

Such moments of drama define Base Notes, which is the opposite of a leisurely tour through a life. Stripe focuses on contained episodes, skipping across the years like a powerfully skimmed stone. What she elects to share with us nearly always feels vital, whether it’s an ice-skating outing with her mother, a wake in the pub where she works, or a disastrous TV appearance. The chapter describing her work for a chatline – ubiquitous in post-pub ad breaks in the 1990s – is a small, bleak masterpiece.

Stripe was a dreamy, solitary child who liked “creating scenarios in the Sindy house, reading Brothers Grimm fairy tales or listening to records with a pair of headphones on. It rarely involved anybody else.” As a description of how a novelist, poet or music writer might be formed (Stripe is all three), this couldn’t be bettered.

As a teenager, she is sexually abused by a local footballer, and gets herself into a risky situation in an older man’s apartment when she travels alone to New York. The book’s use of second person makes such moments of threat almost unbearably intimate: “And then he pushes you into the living room where a small cup of tea is waiting on the table. He is wearing a white dry-cleaned suit and starts stroking his groin as he stares at you.”

In fiction, the second person is involving and immersive (think Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City: “You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head”). But it’s an unusual choice for memoir, which typically depends on communication flowing directly from author to reader. What occurred to me as I read Base Notes, though, is that Stripe, who is now pushing 50, is really in dialogue with the girl and the young woman she was – simultaneously her most intimate companion and a stranger.

The connective structure of the book is scent – each chapter is named for one relevant to that period of Stripe’s life, from Giorgio Beverly Hills to CK One to L’Eau d’Issey. But the overwhelming notes are more fetid than floral. Stripe is highly attuned to the seamier side of things, from “the acidic stink from deep inside your gut” to her “hot fox stink” following a hill climb in France to attend, ironically enough, a perfume-making course. In a brilliantly described later episode, the Calder Valley – where Stripe lives with her husband – floods, the water carrying with it dog poo bags, wet wipes, tampons. “Already,” she writes, “a stench is hanging in the air.” At times this miasma feels inescapable and we long for the prose equivalent of a cracked window. But it’s Stripe’s willingness to acknowledge the more unpalatable aspects of life, and herself, that makes her memoir so compelling.

The only elements that disturb the flow are a couple of odd word choices – “clamouring” instead of clambering, “voluminous”, twice, used to mean loudness – and a slight unreality to the New York section, which feels closer to fiction (although a first visit to that city is often a surreal experience).

Otherwise the writing is immaculate, and when we read of Stripe, in middle age, moving “across to the other side of the valley, where the light shines even in midwinter”, you feel she’s more than earned her patch of rural domesticity.

Base Notes: Scenes from a Northern Girlhood by Adelle Stripe is published by White Rabbit (£12.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £11.69. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Pete F Davies/Getty Images