Books like Perfume & Pain
Astrid Dahl, a lesbian novelist cancelled after a West Hollywood bookstore event, retreats to her Sapphic Scribes writing group, tries to give up pills and drink, and falls for nearly every woman in her orbit while her agent waits for the next book.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Perfume & Pain
Exalted
In Los Angeles, Emily runs an astrology meme account that charges people to read their charts, and Dawn is one of her most devoted followers, as both women's lives, relationships and finances near collapse.
Milk Fed
Rachel, a twenty-four-year-old talent-agency assistant in Los Angeles who controls her life through strict rules about food, falls for the zaftig Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her frozen yogurt shop.
Women
A down-and-out poet in Los Angeles navigates a series of women, bars, and hangovers in Bukowski's autobiographical novel about surviving desire.
The First Bad Man
Cheryl Glickman, a fussy, solitary employee of a women's self-defence nonprofit in Los Angeles, agrees to let her bosses' sullen twenty-year-old daughter move in with her, and her ordered life comes apart.
Pretend I'm Dead
A housecleaner in Taos, New Mexico drifts through odd jobs and stranger relationships, narrating her life with deadpan humour and unacknowledged pain.
Colored Television
Jane, a mixed-race novelist in Los Angeles, has spent ten years on a serious book about mixed-race America, and broke and house-sitting for a famous friend, she decides to try selling a television show instead.
Hot Water Music
Short stories of drunks, failed writers, gamblers and the women who put up with them, set in the bars, racetracks and cheap apartments of Bukowski's Los Angeles.
Detransition, Baby
A trans woman, her ex-boyfriend, and his pregnant wife form an unlikely family in New York, navigating parenthood, identity, and who gets to start over.
Choke
Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout and sex addict, pays for his mother's care home by choking on purpose in restaurants and letting his rescuers send him money, until he learns something about his mother and himself.
The Pisces
Stuck on her dissertation about Sappho and newly dumped, Lucy house-sits her sister's place on Venice Beach, minds the dog, goes to group therapy and falls for a swimmer she meets on the rocks who turns out to be a merman.
Sex and Rage
Jacaranda Leven, a surfer and party girl who drifts through Los Angeles at the end of the 1970s, starts writing seriously and moves to New York, and has to decide what she will give up to keep going.
Big Swiss
Greta, who transcribes the recorded sessions of a sex and relationship coach in Hudson, New York, falls for a client she knows only as Big Swiss, and when she meets her by chance at the dog park, she starts an affair built on a lie.