Authors at Home: Lara Elena Donnelly, “Base Notes”
We are pleased to feature Lara Elena Donnelly, whose debut novel, Amberlough, was nominated for the 2017 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the 2017 Lambda Literary Award. Her latest release, Base Notes, was published on February 1, 2022. Base Notes focuses on Vic Fowler, a perfumer whose scents evoke immersive memories worth killing for. And in New York City, everyone needs a side hustle. Vic’s just happens to be murder. Read on to learn more about Base Notes and Lara Elena Donnelly!
What are you currently reading, watching, listening to? Anything you wholly recommend as being inspiring, uplifting or just really fun?
I have bad pandemic brain when it comes to reading — I have been checking out so many books from the library and failing to finish them. But the ones I have finished recently have been Ursula K. Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea novels, which are incredibly grounding and hopeful and lush. I was lucky enough to get an early copy of Uncommon Charm, by Kat Weaver and Emily Bergslien, which I tore through with relish — when it’s available later this year, I heartily recommend it if you’re looking for something to scratch the itch for a witty historical romp that pours champagne with its right hand and delivers some pretty heavy intellectual and emotional hits with its left.
Watching-wise, I recently watched Arcane on Netflix, which was pure fun on a level I have not experienced since college. My partner and I are both big James Bond fans, so we’ve been watching some of the older, cheesier Bond films and getting a real kick out of them. We also opted to watch Power of the Dog instead of the Super Bowl, and then neither of us could sleep because we just wanted to keep talking about it, which seems like a pretty strong recommendation.
Can you take us through the day in the life of Lara Elena Donnelly? What’s your day-to-day routine like — when you’re writing a book, and when you’re not?
Whether I’m writing a book or not, I work in my day job from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., because I enjoy regular income and access to medical care.
Who cooks dinner depends on who’s got a bee in their bonnet about a particular recipe, and also depends on whether I am on deadline for a book. My partner really kept the household end up while I was trying to get this latest book out the door, but we did end up ordering a lot of takeout anyway.
When I’m on deadline I usually sit back down to write around 8:00 p.m. (Though on Monday nights I have a standing staff meeting to make sure the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers happens every year.) I write until 11:00 p.m., or I’ll stop earlier if I hit the number Scrivener sets as my daily word goal. It’s always weird to me to decide before the book is written how long it’s likely to be, but if you want that satisfying countdown from your progress bar you have to tell the software something.
If I’m not on deadline, I usually end up watching movies with my partner, who has a screenwriting MFA and has done some indie filmmaking. I really have to work to read books in this house, because he always wants to watch some interesting film and I will almost always say yes.
Are you working on any projects that we should look out for in the future?
I’m always working, but I’m not under a contract for anything right now. So I can tell you about the projects but after that they may disappear into the mists of unpublished work!
There’s 90s swing revival racetrack heist comic project set in an invented city in an invented world, which is really the “let’s have fun” project that I have been poking while trying to gin up some energy to tackle the next novel: a loose retelling of the Scottish ballad Tam Lin, set in the New York offices of a multinational media consulting firm.
If you weren’t writing books right now, what would you be doing?
This is an interesting question, because I now work full time as an executive assistant due to years of experience running a workshop for young writers. A workshop I attended as a teen, because I wanted to become a writer. So I’m not even sure I’d have the same day job if I wasn’t an author and hadn’t been trying to become one for so long.
Maybe I would have realized sooner that I have an abiding passion for horticulture and climate resiliency and adaptation and pursued that path. But also: it’s not too late, and you can do a lot of other things while writing books. So check back in five years and see if I’m building some kind of urban greenbelt to control desertification or flooding in a vulnerable city.
What three to five words best describe Base Notes?
Pretentious, gruesome, funny, and hot.
Base Notes relies on knowledge of perfume and the perfume-making process. What was your research like for this book?
My research for any book, such as it is, is always sort of piecemeal. I never know exactly what I need to know until I need to know it, so I usually frontload by reading a lot of potentially useful stuff, and then make up the difference by frantically googling as I write. I really don’t understand people who are able to put in brackets [RESEARCH LATER] or something, and come back once they’re done drafting. I want to know it when I want to know it, because what if it’s important later?
For Base Notes specifically, I was very lucky to work with several fantastic indie perfumers (Chris Rusak of Chris Rusak and Carter Weeks Maddox of Chronotope) on some of the technical and business aspects of Vic Fowler’s world. I also spent a lot of time reading blogs and scrolling hobbyist forums and the personal blogs of perfumers. Diary of a Nose by Jean Claude Ellena was incredibly helpful and beautiful.
In the novel, there is an implied sense of the characters being part of the LGBTQ+ community without making it the central focus of the novel. Why did you decide to write the novel this way and did you face any challenges because of this decision?
“Implied” is such an interesting word choice! Vic is explicitly attracted to and sexually involved with men and women in the text, which I would argue is a shade beyond the mere implication of queerness. In fact, the B is right there in the alphabet soup.
The less explicit — indeed, deliberately obtuse — iteration of queerness in Base Notes is the text’s refusal to gender its narrator. Or, more accurately, the narrator’s refusal to admit to any particular gender. Vic has thought about gender a lot, I expect, or at least felt a lot about it. But it’s not something Vic feels the need to discuss with the reader.
As for why I chose to write Base Notes this way, why does anyone decide to write a novel about cis or straight people, especially novels that don’t focus centrally on their orientation or identity? Vic is who Vic is. The story is about a serial killer who makes perfume. Vic sleeps with men and women and is never given a pronoun. Vic also likes scotch, wears Chelsea boots, has debilitating anxiety, and forgets to eat meals sometimes.
I don’t want to say that Vic’s queerness — implied, explicit, and otherwise — has nothing to do with the story, because it obviously hugely influences the way Vic interacts with the world. I sometimes see stories praised for starring queer characters in a narrative that isn’t about being queer, or I see people asking for more of this kind of story, and every time I see that phrase something about it strikes me as slightly off.
I think stories are always about who the characters are, to the extent that a characters’ experiences and interiority influence their choices. But I also understand the sentiment: what we mean is, we want to see queer protagonists doing things other than coming out, or being gay-bashed, or being disowned by their parents. For instance, maybe we want to see queer serial killers destroying everything and everyone around them in single-minded pursuit of their goal.
I also just thought the pronoun thing was a fun trick to play on readers, which has thus far succeeded in causing exactly as much pronoun chaos in Goodreads and Amazon reviews as I had hoped it would.
Vic Fowler as a narrator is a fascinating character. How did you go about finding Vic’s voice?
Vic’s voice came very naturally, though I thought I was writing a story about someone else and Vic was just narrating it. That short story, “The Dirty American,” was supposed to be about Jonathan Bright, Vic’s mentor, lover, and first victim. But writing as Vic was so delicious, and Vic’s personality so compelling, that Jonathan became a character motivation rather than a protagonist.
What is one big message you want readers to take away from Base Notes?
I’m not sure I want them to take away a message, so much as I hope the story speaks to people who have experienced or are experiencing the struggles Vic and Jane and Beau and Giovanni are experiencing, or similar. It’s an angry book, more than a “message” book, and my hope is that people who feel that same kind of anger feel seen and recognized.
Book Summary:
A lasting impression is worth killing for.
In New York City everybody needs a side hustle, and perfumer Vic Fowler has developed a delicate art that has proved to be very lucrative: creating bespoke scents that evoke immersive memories — memories that, for Vic’s clients, are worth killing for. But the city is expensive, and these days even artisanal murder doesn’t pay the bills. When Joseph Eisner, a former client with deep pockets, offers Vic an opportunity to expand the enterprise, the money is too good to turn down. But the job is too intricate — and too dangerous — to attempt alone.
Manipulating fellow struggling artists into acting as accomplices is easy. Like Vic, they too are on the verge of burnout and bankruptcy. But as relationships become more complicated, Vic’s careful plans start to unravel. Hounded by guilt and a tenacious private investigator, Vic grows increasingly desperate to complete Eisner’s commission. Is there anyone — friends, lovers, coconspirators — that Vic won’t sacrifice for art?
About Lara Elena Donnelly:
Lara Elena Donnelly is the author of the Nebula, Lambda, and Locus-nominated trilogy, the Amberlough Dossier, as well as short fiction and poetry appearing in venues including Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, Nightmare, and Uncanny. She has taught in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College, as well as the Catapult classes in New York and the Alpha SF/F/H Workshop for Young Writers. In the summer, she wears The Cobra & the Canary. In the winter, Nudiflorum. And some others in between, to keep things interesting. As of this writing, she lives on the grounds of the old Hamilton Estate, with a screenwriter and a small mask-and-mantle tabby pretentiously named after a bitter Italian aperitif.
Connect with Lara:
Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads
Read more Authors at Home:
Yasmin Angoe: Her Name is Knight
Lynne Reeves: The Dangers of an Ordinary Night
Gabrielle St. George: How to Murder a Marriage
Cai Emmons: Sinking Islands
Emily Giffin: The Lies that Bind
Jeanette Escudero: The Apology Project
