Elena Bowes chatted with Neroli Lacey about her debut novel, The Perfumer’s Secret. It’s a thrilling book, a page turner, a feast for the senses. It’s a love story to southern France, the region in and around Grasse where the Med meets the Alps.
It’s also a love story to French culture, craftsmanship and tradition. And finally, it’s a love story between two very different people. You’ve got a dynamic plot and a sublime setting. Reading your book made me want to move to this region of France. Where time seems to stand still in a good way. The French Tourism Board should be thanking you.
Neroli’s book centres around a gutsy, young, Manhattan based documentary maker named Zandy, who turns her lens on a legendary perfume maker in the south of France that happens to be celebrating its 300th anniversary.
Zandy has been assigned this story by her boss. She’s not thrilled about what looks like a puff piece, only to discover there’s a lot more to this perfume house than pressed flowers, a dashing CEO to start, and a family history that doesn’t smell so fragrant. The story is not black and white. The truth doesn’t always tell the whole story, which is one reason why I loved this book. Below are the edited highlights of my chat with Neroli. You can listen to the full episode here on my podcast Elena Meets the Author, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Elena: Neroli, you wrote in your newsletter that some writers spend their life building up to the novel they were meant to write. Do you consider The Perfumer’s Secret the novel you were meant to write? And how did your life before this book prepare you to be a novelist?
Neroli: Well, I’ve done a lot of things on the way to writing this book. I was a journalist for many years. I wrote for all the great British newspapers, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Evening Standard. I’ve been an investment banker and a commodity futures trader. I’ve travelled all over the world.
I’m the proud mother of two wildly spirited daughters and an adventurous stepson. I have been training my whole life to do this work and I’m now living the life of my dreams.
So, to answer the first part of your question, is this the ultimate book? I think it was the book I was meant to write then. It’s been two years in the publishing process. For me as a writer, I’m constantly raising the bar of where I want to be. So, I think it’s a balancing act between being content with the work that you put out in the world, slowing down a minute and being happy with the work that you’ve done and celebrating that. And at the same time, learning to write character. I’ll be doing that, please God, for the rest of my life. There is no way to master this. It’s a never-ending journey.
Elena: Did you always know you’d love to be a novelist?
Neroli: You know, I did, but I didn’t dare take the step. I think two things, you can’t pay the bills as a novelist unless you’re, I don’t know, Kristen Hanna or Emily Henry or Colleen Hoover and maybe back then in my twenties and thirties and forties, it wasn’t quite the right time for me.
I knew because reading books made me feel alive in a way that nothing else did. Perhaps only my beloved family. But then it’s a long journey to have the courage to pursue that there’s a lot of why me and can I do this and so on.
I think what I’ve learned most from this experience not just of writing – I’ve written three novels and I’m just beginning my fourth now- this is the first one to be published – but what I have learned is certainly in terms of publishing the book and now engaging with the world with my work, I really have learned follow your spark.
If you have a certain spark, listen to it. You don’t have to have the path to get there. You take one step and the path appears. And for me it was a very long journey.
Elena: Can you tell us about the research involved in this book?
Neroli: Yes, the research was fantastic. I am bookish, so I did start with a huge pile of books, and I read about Tapputi from Mesopotamia in 1200 BC all the way through to modern day perfumes, the celebrity scents, the signature scents, the artisan houses, and the big commercial houses.
But also, we do spend a lot of time at our holiday home in this incredible corner of France, just 20 minutes down the road from Grasse. There’s a special microclimate here, which allows all these wonderful flowers to grow. So partly it was living here and learning about the traditions of pressing flowers and so on.
There’s a big company on the hillside of Grasse, called Victor Mane and Company, and I remembered that my mother had taken me there as a child. So, we asked if I could visit the factory and learn more about the process of making perfume. They’re very secretive, and they said no,, even though they’d been doing business with my family for at least 50 years, so I was a bit annoyed but in a way it made it more intriguing. I started to imagine what was behind those closed doors and behind those windows and that made it really quite fun.
Well into the book, and many years after we started to come to this part of France, we were told about a lovely restaurant in a very small hotel called Hotel Particulier des Jasmin. And we went there for the first time and suddenly it came back to me that my mother had taken me to this house as a child. I remember arriving in the dark, in the rain. And this was the restaurant that we love now so much. And it was the former family home of the Victor Mane family perfume business in Grasse.
And then, wait for this, they have these beautiful terraces and for many years they’ve been growing jasmine on those terraces but a few years before we went to the restaurant for the first time, they changed the jasmine and they now grow Neroli on those terraces It was just amazing, the book was really meant to be.
Elena: Wow, quite the story.
Neroli: I do think that writing a novel is pattern making and making patterns out of disparate things. So, for me, there was a lot of meaning, making that connection to my late mother, making a love letter to her, to the region, to the craft, and so on.
Elena: You mentioned how writing character is a continuing challenge for you. And I wanted to say that I loved all your characters. I wanted to discuss Zandy, the filmmaker, and Dominique, the reserved and dashing chief executive of Severin, the perfume maker, that Zandy’s making a film about.
How easy was it to come up with those two characters?
Neroli: For me, I don’t think anything comes fully formed. It’s a sort of incremental process of putting your bottom in the seat every day and just allowing the characters to come to you in increments.
I do remember a moment with Zandy, the filmmaker, where I was looking around for a photograph online that would inspire me as to what she looked like.
And I found a picture of Kristin Scott Thomas in The English Patient. She’s wearing a crisp white shirt, and she’s got this buttery soft leather jacket and she’s got these gorgeous chestnut waves that sort of hang in a bob. And to me, Kristin Scott Thomas is the sort of ultimate in cool.
She’s this English woman who lives in Paris and she just looks like she’s got everything together. She’s probably some major depressive who bites her nails or something, but she’s got that amazing look. I’m a terrible romantic. Zandy was a big romantic. She went into documentary filmmaking thinking she was going to be flying across the desert in a Jeep with her hair blowing in the wind and covered in sand. That’s how I go about life, seeing everything in a romantic way. So (Kristin and Zandy) came together and then I started to feel excited about Zandy.
As for Dominique, the very reserved heir of the 300-year-old perfume house, there is somebody in my life who is extremely reserved. And it was always very annoying. I’m a very open person. I open my mouth far too much, but I find it difficult when people really don’t show their cards. And I always found it very difficult, this person who I loved, who wouldn’t really talk about anything that was close to his heart. I started to imagine what it would be like to be the son and heir of this perfume business, to have so much responsibility, to have so much on his shoulders
And (Dominique) has this alcoholic mother. So, he’s an adult child of an alcoholic. I tried to think about what that would feel like for him and in the process, I ended up having a lot of compassion for my friend. I ended up understanding and loving this person in my life even more through the experience of writing Dominique.
Elena: I thought you were going to model Dominique after Ralph Fiennes in The English Patient.
I was wondering if you have any collaborations in the works? Possibly with a perfume house?
Neroli: I am talking to an incredible perfume house in Grasse and I’m really hoping that they want to sell my book in a box set alongside a bottle of their amazing perfume.
Elena: I understand you’re working on another book?
Neroli: Yes, I’m working on the next one in this series called The Vineyarder’s Secret. In fact, I just got back today from the very heart of Provence in the area near Aix en Provence and Arles, doing a little tour of vineyards. I don’t drink alcohol just because I don’t really enjoy it. It doesn’t relax me. But I feel that I have to taste some wine if I’m going to write a book called The Vineyarder’s Secret. So, my cousin’s got a rather wonderful cellar and he’s been plying me with amazing wine all weekend.
Elena: Do you have a plot, or are you more on the research stage?
Neroli: I’m trying to shape the story while I do the research. It’s so tempting as a writer to get carried away with the research. And it’s so tempting to dump the facts into the book, so you have to be quite careful.
And Zandy will have a cameo role in this book. And it’s going to be part of a series set in France. There’ll be about five books.
I’m really interested in the arc of a woman’s life between 30 as she comes into her professional strength and 40 as she comes out of her childbearing years. And the choices that she makes between 30 and 40. So I’m going to use the series as a love letter to the different arts and crafts of France, but also with a peek at the reality of France today. It’s not all pie in the sky. There are some tough parts as well.