Coming to My Senses: A Story of Perfume, Pleasure, and an Unlikely Bride

by Alyssa Harad

Overview

“It’s been a long while since I’ve read a book so luscious. This memoir about falling in love with perfume made me want to smell everything.” -Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You


“A woman, I think we can all agree, should smell like herself. But which self?” 

Late one night near the middle of her life when all her careful plans have gone awry, Alyssa Harad stumbles across a blog devoted to reviewing perfume. She is not the kind of woman who wears perfume. But she is a reader, and the ability to describe a fragrance unfolding in the air with words seems like a magic trick. In the reviews perfume becomes a place, a person, a moment in history. Perfume becomes a story at a moment when she needs a new one. Harad follows the magical trail of scent from a private museum of rare essences in Austin, Texas, to the glamorous fragrance showrooms of Manhattan, and finally to a homecoming in Boise, Idaho—undoing and expanding her understanding of gender, femininity, pleasure and identity along the way. Candid, elegant, insightful, full of lush description and gentle humor, Coming to My Senses reveals the intimate connections between our senses and our selves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143123385
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/25/2013
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.08(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Alyssa Harad holds a PhD in English from the University of Texas, Austin. She has written about perfume for O, The Oprah Magazine and the award-winning perfume blogs Now Smell This and Perfume-Smellin’ Things. She lives with her husband in Austin, Texas.

Table of Contents

Author's Note ix

Part I Learning How to Smell

1 The Beautiful Surprise 3

2 The Librarian, the Russians, and the Scent of Honey 18

3 The Curator and the Cowgirls 50

Part II The Problem of Becoming a Bride

4 The Grandma Box 83

5 The JAR Experience 102

6 The Kind of Woman Who Wears Perfume 132

7 The Perfume Shower 171

8 A Kiss and a Dream of White Flowers 200

Part III Coming to My Senses

9 Sunflowers and City Light 207

10 Breakfast at Bergdorf s 219

11 My Mother's Femme 232

Acknowledgments 253

Appendix: More to Read and Smell 257

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Didn’t anyone tell Alyssa Harad that scent resists translation into words? In this elegant and witty memoir, she turns aroma into prose so naturally they seem like a single form of expression. I was delighted to find in one clear-eyed book a convincing romance, a novelistic parade of quirky characters, and a lyrical ode to the mysterious thrill of being alive.” —Michael Sims, author of Adam’s Navel and The Story of Charlotte’s Web

Editorial Reviews

It’s been a long while since I’ve read a book so luscious. This memoir about falling in love with perfume made me want to smell everything.”-Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You
 
“I love Coming To My Senses. I love its quietly revolutionarily gender politics, and its politics of pleasure. Alyssa Harad is thoughtful, expansive, wise and playful, especially on all matters gender.” -Katherine Angel, author of Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, Daddy Issues, and Unmastered: A Book of Desire Difficult to Tell
 
“Coming to My Senses is a book I think of often, even years after having read it. It’s about perfume, but also about sensuality and self-knowledge and so much more.”-Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London
 
“Coming to My Senses is an intoxicating journey of a book, as lush, sensual, and complex as the finest French perfume. A must-read for any fragrance lover.”
-Deanna Raybourn author of the Lady Julia Grey and Veronica Speedwell Mystery Series
 
“Alyssa Harad’s smart and sensuous memoir is not really about perfume; the book cites only a handful by name. Coming to My Senses is a book about perfume lovers—that very special brand of aesthete—and a sly and moving interrogation of the conflict between her identity as a feminist and an intellectual and the popular idea of perfume as something frivolous.”-Elisa Gabbert, author of The Unreality of Memory and The Word Pretty
 
“Alyssa Harad's memoir is a complete delight, not only for the senses, but for the mind. If her sentences had a fragrance, they would smell like the most opulent rose with a squeeze of crisp citrus — sumptuous, fresh, delicious.” -Rachel Syme, staff writer at The New Yorker and co-author of The Dry Down
 
“Harad recounts her Kate Chopin-like awakening to the sensual joys of perfume and the fulfillment, happiness and fragrant friendships that follow.”— Los Angeles Times
 
“Bursting with sensuous delights .—Dallas News

“This is a book that arouses and galvanizes the senses—all of them. . . . The very word puts a lot of us on edge—perfume—but turns out it’s just the elbow crook inching open the door into Harad’s memoir, which is as much about her surprise at delighting in perfume’s history, community, and aromatic allures as it is about her own reckoning with what it means to be a woman. . . . For the reader, her pleasure is catching.”—Austin Chronicle  

“...what makes this memoir so appealing are its deeper notes, the ones that linger on after reading: the story of a how a no-nonsense, underemployed English Ph.D., who usually dresses like 'an unmade bed,' discovers the pleasures of femininity and her own senses through an affair with fragrance.”—Catherine Hollis, BookPage (Top Pick)  

 
“Harad charms everyone—with stories, recommendations, and delight. . . . This memoir is lovely and evocative, as she becomes more comfortable with herself and her open appreciation for things, like perfume, that are about beauty and pleasure.” —Publishers Weekly 

 
“... most surprisingly of all, Harad found herself reclaiming a femininity that she had disowned. . . . Like a good perfume, this book is slow to unfold, but the author’s account of her experiences is well worth the wait. A quiet delight.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Few delights match the instant, primal gratification given by a beautiful fragrance—yet too often we ignore the power of this sense. Alyssa Harad’s fascinating (and often funny) story of how she became bewitched by the pleasures and culture of perfume will give readers a new appreciation for scent's intimate role in their lives.”—Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project

 

“By turns witty, sensuous, and poignant, Coming to My Senses is a book that demands to be savored and shared. And I challenge anyone to read this without ransacking the dark corners of their closets and cosmetics bags for a scent to put on, and then another and then another…”
—Deborah Harkness, author of A Discovery of Witches

From the Publisher

The age of 36 was a watershed year for Harad: after earning her Ph.D. in English she found herself adrift, no longer wanting the busy life she’d created, longing to be a writer but unsure how to go about it. While avoiding work on a freelance project, she Web surfed to a perfume blog, and everything changed. She became hooked on the writers’ paeans to scent, and although her attraction to perfume contrasted with how she saw herself (“a serious, Birkenstock-wearing feminist”), she was unable to resist first taking a nervous trip to the mall to smell a featured scent and, as her fascination grew, immersing herself in the real-world community of perfume devotees. She fulfills her new thirst for knowledge through travel and study; she joins a local perfume salon in Austin, Tex., ventures into the perfume sections of Bergdorf’s and Barney’s in Manhattan, and, no longer able to contain her enthusiasm, charms everyone—with stories, recommendations, and delight—at her perfume-themed bridal shower in Boise, Idaho. This memoir is lovely and evocative, as Harad becomes more comfortable with herself and her open appreciation for things, like perfume, that are about beauty and pleasure. An appendix will help converts stock their own perfume closets. (June)

Publishers Weekly

A charming memoir about how a woman's "torrid affair" with perfume changed her life. Harad was a "serious, Birkenstock-wearing feminist" in her mid 30s when she fell helplessly in love with perfume. Her passion manifested after a personal rebellion against the "busyness" she had created for herself in lieu of an academic career she didn't want. Online perfume blogs became her gateway to an exciting and seductively alien world. Embarrassed by the apparent frivolity of her interests, Harad hid a growing collection of perfume samples in her closet. But the more deeply she became involved with her "secret lovers," the more she began to open up to life. It began with her nose: She refined her sense of smell to the point where she developed a "private internal vocabulary of smell," which derived from her own storehouse of half-forgotten memories. As she learned to put perfume scents into words and understand the complex ways in which perfumes unfold upon the skin, her desire to experience other scents grew. She sought out other scent-lovers, a journey that led her first to a fragrance laboratory in Austin, Texas, and then to exclusive perfume showrooms in New York. But most surprisingly of all, Harad found herself reclaiming a femininity that she had disowned and wanting to be a bride. All her reasons--"some political and idealistic, others personal and idiosyncratic"--for not wanting to marry her partner of 10 years fell by the wayside. Like a good perfume, this book is slow to unfold, but the author's account of her experiences is well worth the wait. A quiet delight.

Kirkus Reviews