"Homegirl is Flawed:" A Q&A With Anna Dorn About Her Modern Lesbian Pulp Novel "Perfume and Pain"

"I think her rejection of lesbian culture mostly stems from internalized homophobia and being afraid of her own desire."

In June, I spoke with Chloé Caldwell about her novella, Women, and its original working title, “Dyke Aching.” During that conversation, she brought up Anna Dorn’s Perfume and Pain, promising it was “the most drama you will ever see. This narrator is just addicted to women and how it all hurts all the time.”

In the weeks since I spoke with Chloé, two things have happened: an incredible queer indie bookshop in Glasgow, Category is Books, created a bookshelf dedicated to Dyke Aching (pictured below). Second, I sniffed out Perfume and Pain to confirm it would fall in line in the Dyke Acting section right after Women and Jenny Fran Davis’s Dykette.

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Perfume and Pain’s narrarator is Astrid Dahl, a lesbian novelist and self-proclaimed “female faggot” who prizes womanhood and femininity. Astrid’s obsession with Ivy, a mysterious new femme in her Sapphic Scribes writing group coincides with a slow burning crush on Penelope, the older art dyke next door. Frequently operating on a cocktail of Adderall, beer, weed, and cigarettes that she refers to as as “The Patricia Highsmith,” Astrid is easily distracted and forgetful. Instead of working on her new novel, she spends her time ordering rare scents off the internet and imagining she’s a character in one of the lesbian pulp fiction novels Ivy is considering for her thesis, which is:

“…that lesbian pulp has been unfairly overlooked. That it has merit. That while it’s been dismissed as homophobic, maybe our dismissal is even more homophobic, because it lacks an understanding that lesbian relationships are not straight relationships. That they have their own specific set of rules and expectations, and that melodrama is part of their special power, not something to be avoided.”