I am an Adelle Stripe fan, I love her free verse poetry and her memoir/essays, and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Black Teeth and a Brilliant SI am an Adelle Stripe fan, I love her free verse poetry and her memoir/essays, and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile, since I wasn’t familiar with Andrea Dunbar before I read her biography, so I was eager to read this memoir. I knew it would be brilliant, but it exceeded my expectations.
This is an intimate and deeply moving coming of age story about a sensitive, bright, observant girl born in 1976 in a working class neighborhood in northern England, a portrait of a mother daughter relationship with all the small hurts and acts of absolute loyalty and love that will be familiar to most women, and one woman’s struggle to live a creative life.
Adelle tells her own story with courageous candor: a strident, fundamentalist grandmother, a bigger-than-life mother who loved her family, but chafed at the expectations of motherhood, a caring father who spent maybe too much time on farm work, and Adele’s own often misguided, sometimes frighteningly misguided, search for her place in the world.
Olfactory memory is closely linked to emotions and are highly evocative of past experiences: each section starts with the name a perfume or cologne, the elements of the scent, and what the scent connotes. For Adelle these scents bring back memories of sneaking out with her sweet grandfather to escape from her domineering and critical Jehovah’s Witness grandmother for an afternoon during dreaded summer visits; Sundays spent in various ballrooms accompanying her mother on her quest to win the British Hairdressing Championship; a few almost disastrous weeks in NYC by herself; the cast of quirky and creative friends, lovers, roommates, bosses and co-workers she in her reckless twenties; pointless jobs, fun jobs, weird jobs; late night shifts; freezing flats; poverty; and finally reconciliations, college, a PhD, and the handsome writer from Durham.
Fans of Hilary Mantel, Jeannette Winterson, and Douglas Stewart will love this. It is funny, sad, heartbreaking and heartwarming, and brutally honest.
This story will resonate with anyone who has yearned for an authentic and creative life and anyone who has struggled to find their place.
I loved this book and cannot recommend it strongly enough.
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