Meet The Author - Adelle Stripe - Base Notes (Wetherby bookshop) | Kemps Bookshop & General Store
Arts
Literary Arts
With warmth, wit and unflinching humour, Base Notes documents that lost, last tribe that rarely gets served by contemporary literature – the Northern working class. This memoir 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. Born in 1976, Adelle Stripe grew up in Tadcaster, North Yorkshire and worked a variety of dead-end jobs until enrolling at university as a creative writing student at the age of 30. Originally a poet, she published her first three collections as chapbooks, and wrote short stories for small press journals and literary magazines. Her debut novel, Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile, was based on the life and work of Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar. First published by Wrecking Ball Press, it was later acquired by Fleet (Little, Brown). Black Teeth was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and Portico Prize for Literature. It was an Observer book of the year. In 2019, the novel was adapted for stage, and received widespread critical acclaim. In 2022, her account of the controversial Irish/Algerian punk band, Fat White Family, was published by White Rabbit. Ten Thousand Apologies tells the band’s story in an innovative novelistic method. It was a Sunday Times bestseller, and a Rough Trade book of the year. The biography was shortlisted for the prestigious Penderyn Music Book Prize. Adelle Stripe holds a PhD by Research in creative writing and is a Burgess Fellow at the University of Manchester. As a journalist, she has written for The Quietus, Yorkshire Post, New Statesman and many more. Adelle Stripe said: ‘I have been held to ransom by these stories for many years. Some have appeared in poetic form, others as flash fiction, or chapters in anthologies. It is a culmination of almost two decades of chiselling at the literary coalface. As much as it is a sensory memoir, Base Notes is also an unflinching account of womanhood and smalltown life - and the pitch-black humour that runs deep like a seam through northern culture. BOOK WILL BE PUBLISHED Feb 13th and available to purchase on or after that date
Information Source: Kemps Books & Kemps General Store | eventbrite
