How to Smell Like My Current Favorite Books
Capturing the essences of ten works by Jackie Ess, Lydia Kiesling, Mona Awad, David Graeber, and more.
Hi! I’ve been reading SO much lately after a two-year drought. I wanted to share ten of my most recent and beloved reads alongside scents that pair with their very essences, from the hardened viscerality of Mona Awad’s Bunny to the heady toxicity of Lydia Kiesling’s Mobility. Let me know if you like posts like this—I’m always happy to write more about scents and reads, now that I’m out of my dastardly slump!
P.S. Three of the works below are above the paywall, and you should definitely, DEFINITELY check them out even if you’re not a paid sub (and if you want to be, I can make it happen for cheapp or free, just respond to this email!).
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THANK YOU for being here, and I am always available @that.esque on Instagram for sartorial scandals/situations/summons. Here is a little preview of what’s below the paywall:
Darryl is the best book I’ve ever read, I think, and that terrifies me, because where do I go from here? Gifted to me by my most brilliant friends Adrian and Jay, this novel unravels in sharp bursts of chapters, each compulsively easy to read and heart-rendingly written as the titular protagonist wends his way through thoughts and, possibly (or not), revelations. You should go into this book completely blind, so I’ll leave it at that, except to say that fans of Dennis Cooper might love this novel (though the more squeamish among us will be able to read it without the same warnings I’d give for one of Cooper’s works).
Mandy Aftel’s virtuosic EDP “Fig” is characterized by a maturity not present in any other perfume I own, a deep and molten gravity completely subverted by the near-fecal base of hyraceum that creates an olfactory illusion of fig out of the perfume’s true notes of fir, citrus, and jasmine. This cheekiness and self-conscious sensuality, plus the complex femininity depicted by the perfume’s fecundity, feel like a perfect match for Darryl, though he wouldn’t be so sure.
AJ and Jay also recommended Mobility, by local Portland author Lydia Kiesling, and this was a more challenging read for me to get into: drenched in the fetid histories of the oil industry and buoyed by a distinctly unlikable (though even more distinctly relatable) protagonist, Bunny, the novel chronicles the bitterly realistic trajectory of a person devoid of convictions aside from when things directly affect her lifestyle. It has never been clearer that the personal is political than in the story of an “apolitical” girl, then woman, who travels the world with her family as a child before finding meaning in the material comforts afforded to her by working in a field she resolutely refuses to acknowledge the harm done by. Bunny’s unsubtle obsession with grasping onto her youth is a poignant reverberation of her inability to see climate catastrophe for what it is, and Kiesling’s rich, deft writing makes spending time even with such a dud thoroughly enjoyable. I left this book feeling like my every action was being narrated by its author.
Of course, I had to pick a fragrance with an oily, gasoline-like base, and this one is perfect for Mobility with its overwhelming intensity not-at-all covered up with more feminine notes of magnolia blossom and Davana. The bottle’s iridescent glint perfectly mimicks the oil slick on the book’s cover, and the scent’s friendly price point makes it feel like something Bunny might have gotten her hands on and treasured as she moved from Athens to Baku at age 15.
I me Marcus Scott Williams because his book Sparse Black Whimsy was so impressive I knew I needed to know its author, and now with its sequel, I am lucky enough to call him one of my best friends, but that doesn’t change the fact that I think msw is one of the important voices of our generation. His loose, loopy, emphatically and proudly Black prose weaves in and out of poesy, recounting moments spent high under club lighting or listening for the whir of an apartment building’s faulty elevator. msw’s work is precisely what New York is at its best: dreamy but grounded, icy cool but vulnerable, boisterous but lyrical.
The Alloy Studio’s Silver Haze is a sticky scent, full of saffron leather and cheap strawberry undergirded by a wave of good weed, the perfect scent to accompany a quick trip into msw’s New York with a joint behind your ear, someone else’s vape in your hand, and unsoured love in your heart.
