An L.A. writer checks her phone, makes passes in Anna Dorn’s ‘Perfume & Pain’

“[A]s a difficult woman, I’ve always been drawn to L.A.: its cotton candy-colored smog and pre-apocalyptic climate, sunning lizards, lazy diction, palm trees, strip malls, bad values. It’s a goal-oriented town but pretends not to be, and I live for artifice.”

So writes the narrator of Anna Dorn’s “Perfume & Pain,” a novel about a wickedly articulate, young, lusty artist behaving badly.

Law student-turned-writer of edgy lesbian fiction Astrid Dahl lives, writes, over-analyzes, and fantasizes about every woman who crosses her path — all from a bungalow in a leafy L.A. hilltop, far from her oppressive parents. With iPhone in hand, Adderal in purse, IPA in a kombucha bottle in the cup holder, she’s the character Astrid Lindgren and Roald Dahl would write if they conspired to create a too-cute-to-be-cancelled Instagram character living in a fantasyland on a diet of brain-altering chemicals. She’s Pippi Longstocking as media influencer, Matilda raised on the internet.

When we first meet Astrid, she’s recently said something in an interview that she thought was funny but Twitter did not. So, while her agent does damage control, Astrid avoids googling herself and hangs with friends. There’s Felix, her outdoorsman brother who stinks of BO and is presumptuous enough to ask if he can use her phone charger; Otto, a “party boy” from college; Zev, an “esoteric nerd”; and “algorithmically hot” Kat Gold, who, according to Astrid, is a wanna-be lesbian and who is producing the film version of Astrid’s novel.

As Astrid observes, evaluates and tries not to ruffle feathers during Zoom meetings, she struggles to write her next book (writing was easy when she was 30 but is difficult now that she’s 35). “There was a point at which my politics matched the zeitgeist,” she thinks, “and maybe this is just part of aging, but lately my politics feel unfashionable.”

Sucks to grow old and irrelevant.

Soon, Astrid joins a writing group where she meets Ivy, a tantalizing academic who drives a pink car and smells like metallic orchids. Their affair is deep and quick but, soon, violently obsessive. Concerned for Astrid’s safety, her Gen-X lesbian artist neighbor, Penelope, comes to the younger woman’s rescue. Seduction ensues.

Dorn’s previous novels, “Vagablonde” (2020) and “Exalted” (2022), follow similar young female artists trying to exist by doing basically nothing. On the surface, our narrator appears annoyingly privileged and narcissistic, like your own daughter fretting over every message. But just as you wonder how Astrid’s friends put up with her, she spouts enough self-critical observations to win your sympathy.

“I sit down wanting to write the great lesbian love story,” she says, “but wacko [expletives] just keep coming out.”

It’s a fun read, excessively self-reflective, yes, but perceptive and witty — like a Sally Rooney novel set in Southern California. Many times I laughed out loud. And though it’s embarrassing to admit, the seduction scene is riveting. We’ve all been there, over-analyzed our every move — especially when smitten.

Christine Brunkhorst is a Minneapolis-based writer of essays and fiction.

By: Anna Dorn.

Publisher: Simon and Schuster, 352 pages, $18.99.