Perfume & Pain Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Updated on October 5, 2026

Verdict: A sharp, frank and often very funny sapphic satire of literary Los Angeles with a starred Kirkus review behind it, held back by a heroine half its readers can’t stand and an ending that runs past its best stopping point.

Best for: Readers who want literary fiction with a mean streak and real heat, who enjoy spending a whole book inside the head of a woman behaving badly, and who don’t need the love story to end in a tidy pairing.

Heat level: ★★★☆☆ (3/5 — frank, frequent and played for comedy rather than lingered over)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.7/5 — a 3.80 Goodreads average across roughly 18,800 ratings, with an unlikeable-narrator split that is more intentional than accidental)

Tropes: Messy heroine, love triangle, 1950s lesbian pulp homage, Hollywood and publishing satire, cancel-culture comedy, older neighbour, younger academic, addiction and relapse, unreliable self-image, morally grey characters.

Perfume & Pain by Anna Dorn is a standalone, traditionally published novel from Simon & Schuster (May 2024) that sits squarely in literary and character-driven lesbian fiction while borrowing the sex, jealousy and melodrama of mid-century pulp — a “lightly cancelled” Los Angeles novelist caught between a younger grad student who studies lesbian pulp for a living and the older, wholesome neighbour who seems to have everything Astrid lacks.

It has a 3.80 average across roughly 18,800 Goodreads ratings and more than 4,300 written reviews, a starred review from Kirkus, a positive notice from Publishers Weekly, and a TV adaptation in development with Clea DuVall attached to write and direct. It also has one of the most divided reader conversations of any book in our contemporary lesbian romance coverage, and almost all of it is about one woman. Whether you will enjoy her company is the whole question.

What Is Perfume & Pain About?

Perfume & Pain is literary comedy first and romance second. It is set in present-day Los Angeles among writers, aspiring screenwriters, wellness people and the online discourse that orbits all of them, and it uses the shape of a 1950s lesbian pulp novel — obsession, a rival, a fall — as a frame for a story about ego, sobriety and reputation. The question is less who Astrid ends up with than whether she can stop sabotaging herself long enough to end up with anyone.

Astrid Dahl is a mid-list novelist whose last book cycle ended badly, and she arrives in a small bungalow with little more than her perfume collection and a defensive sense of humour. Ivy, a graduate student researching lesbian pulp, is everything Astrid’s vanity wants. Penelope, the older vegan painter next door, is everything her better instincts suspect she needs. The book is told entirely from Astrid’s first-person point of view, which buys it the comedy — she is ruthlessly funny about everyone, including herself — and costs it any outside view of the two women she is circling.

What Makes This Sapphic Literary Satire Work

The voice: Astrid’s narration is the most-praised element across reader reviews and the trade notices alike. Readers repeatedly say they laughed out loud, and Kirkus singles out the acerbic wit as the engine of the book.
The pulp homage: The love-triangle-and-ruin structure deliberately echoes classics like Odd Girl Out, and Kirkus calls it a pitch-perfect homage to the form.
The perfume: Scent is used as characterisation — each woman is introduced through how she smells — and readers name the fragrance detail as the thing that grounds an otherwise chaotic story.
The satire: The send-ups of cancel culture, literary LA and queer online discourse land for readers who live near those worlds, and the comparison that keeps recurring is to BoJack Horseman.
The pace: Even critical readers say it reads fast; StoryGraph’s community tags it fast-paced.

Book Synopsis

Astrid Dahl is in her mid-thirties, newly sober-ish, and recently on the wrong side of the internet. A public misstep has left her career “lightly cancelled” and she has retreated to a little Los Angeles bungalow with her shelves of perfume bottles, a novel she can’t seem to write, and the online writing group she helped found, Sapphic Scribes. She tells herself she is starting over. Mostly she is looking for something to want.

She finds two somethings. Ivy is younger, sharp and slightly aloof, a graduate student whose research into 1950s lesbian pulp novels makes her feel, to Astrid, like a character walking out of one. Penelope lives next door: older, kind, vegan, a painter with an easy warmth that wins over Astrid’s friends almost immediately — which is exactly why Astrid can’t decide whether she adores her or resents her. Astrid throws herself at the first while being drawn, against her own commentary, toward the second.

Then her career shows a pulse. An actress is interested in adapting her work, and the attention Astrid has been starving for starts to come back. So do the cravings, the jealousy and the drinks with writers’ names on them. The better things look on paper, the less reliable Astrid becomes as a witness to her own life — and the open question is whether this time she can tell the difference between the thing she wants and the thing that is actually good for her.

My Review

The voice is the reason to read this, and it is a genuinely good one. Dorn writes Astrid as vain, petty, horny and very observant, and the observations are funny in a way that most comic novels only approximate. She is cruel about wellness culture, literary careerism and online politics, and — crucially — about herself, which keeps it from curdling. Kirkus called it the author’s best work, and on the evidence of the voice alone I understand why.

The second real strength is structural. Using the pulp triangle as scaffolding gives a messy book a clear shape: two women who represent two versions of Astrid’s future, and a heroine whose choices between them double as choices about drinking, ambition and honesty. It is the trick Carol plays with its own era’s constraints, played for laughs, and the nod is deliberate — Astrid’s drink of choice is named after Patricia Highsmith.

Where it struggles is the narrator, and that is not just my reaction; it is the dominant theme in the critical reviews. A sizeable minority find Astrid insufferable rather than entertaining, and several say she never really changes, which makes the final stretch feel unearned. Alongside that sit two structural complaints: a first half that some readers call slow or rough going, and an ending that more than one reviewer thinks overshoots a better, more ambiguous stopping point late in the book.

The expectation to reset is the genre label. The marketing and some list placements present this as a sapphic love story. It reads as a literary comedy about addiction and ego that contains a love triangle, and it does not resolve that triangle the way a romance would. If “romance” is what drew you, calibrate: the heat and the yearning are real, the guaranteed pairing is not. If “literary fiction” is what worried you, relax — this is fast, filthy and funny, not difficult.

My honest note: A four-star voice in a three-and-a-half-star structure, saved by how often it makes you laugh. If you need to like your narrator, skip it; if you can enjoy one who is wrong about almost everything, it is one of the funniest sapphic novels of the last few years.

Element	In Perfume & Pain
Central relationship	Astrid Dahl between Ivy (younger grad student) and Penelope (older neighbour) — a love triangle, single first-person POV
Core tropes	Messy heroine, love triangle, lesbian pulp homage, Hollywood and publishing satire, cancel-culture comedy
Setting	Present-day Los Angeles — a bungalow, a Zoom writing group, the edges of the TV industry
Heat level	3/5 — frank and frequent, written for comedy as much as heat
Series	Standalone, 352 pages; ending described by reviewers as ambiguous rather than a romance HEA
Content notes	Alcohol and drug use, addiction and relapse, blackouts, toxic relationship dynamics, gaslighting, stalking, narrator jokes some readers read as biphobic, transphobic or fatphobic

How Spicy Is Perfume & Pain?

Steamy, but not in the way a romance reader might expect. Kirkus calls the book steamy, and both the reader reviews and the trade notices treat sex and desire as central to Astrid’s story rather than garnish. The scenes are explicit enough that this is clearly an adult novel, and frequent enough that readers mention them unprompted — but they are written in Astrid’s comic, self-regarding voice, so they read as character moments with jokes in them rather than slow, immersive set pieces. I’m placing it at 3/5. romance.io lists the book but shows no steam rating for it, which is consistent with it being catalogued as literary fiction rather than adult romance.

The thing worth knowing in advance is the context, not the content: much of the desire in the book is tangled up with drinking, drugs and Astrid’s worst decisions, and Kirkus notes increasingly frequent blackouts alongside an on-again, off-again drug and alcohol habit. No reviewer I found flags anything more extreme than that. If you want the same frank, unromanticised approach to sex in a literary frame, Big Swiss is the closest match on the site; for the original mid-century version of the heat, Women’s Barracks shows what the pulp era considered scandalous.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you enjoy an unlikeable narrator as long as she is funny, you have a soft spot for lesbian pulp and its melodrama, you want literary fiction with explicit sex and a real comic edge, and you know the LA, publishing or queer-internet worlds well enough to enjoy them being skewered.

You may want to skip it if: a narrator you dislike ruins a book for you, you want a central couple and a guaranteed HEA, addiction and relapse content is hard for you right now, or jokes at the expense of bisexual, trans, fat or butch people will land as cruelty rather than satire. If you need warmth and a clear couple, our She Drives Me Crazy review covers a far gentler option.

In short: brilliant company for readers who like a disaster at the wheel, exhausting for readers who don’t.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (October 2026)

This is not a BookTok book, whatever lists (including our own sapphic BookTok roundup) might suggest. The discovery engine is the literary press and the trade reviews: a starred Kirkus notice, a positive Publishers Weekly review, a Minnesota Star Tribune review comparing it to Sally Rooney relocated to Southern California. Then, in summer 2024, Legendary Television picked it up as a series with Clea DuVall attached to write and direct, which put it in front of a much wider queer audience. I found no production update since. Web search turns up no Reddit thread of any size; the real conversation lives in the 4,300-plus Goodreads reviews and on StoryGraph.

The audiobook is part of that reach. Simon & Schuster Audio released it narrated by Natalie Naudus, and at least one reviewer credits the narration with carrying her through a heroine she found polarising.

Prefer audio? Listen to Perfume & Pain on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The humour, above everything — “laugh out loud” is the recurring phrase, and blog reviewers say plainly that it made them really laugh. Second is Astrid herself, for the readers who get her: a flawed, self-aware heroine they root for in spite of themselves. Third is the pulp homage and the perfume detail, which give the book a texture readers describe as niche in the best way. The Goodreads distribution backs up the warmth: around two-thirds of ratings are four or five stars, and only about 8% are one or two.

What readers argue about and complain about: Astrid, first and loudest. The same trait that delights half the readership is the single most repeated criticism from the other half — she is variously called hateful, insufferable and static, and the specific mechanism of the complaint is that the book asks for sympathy at the end without showing enough change to earn it. Second: the online-discourse register. Several low-star reviewers say the Twitter-speak and hot takes read as shallow, with one comparing the experience to scrolling Twitter and Fragrantica at once. Third: shape. A slow first half and an over-extended ending recur, including from readers who liked the book overall. The genuine split is over the narrator’s jokes about bisexual, trans, fat and butch people — some read them as satire of Astrid, others as the book’s own blind spots — and on StoryGraph at least one reviewer notes the cast is almost entirely skinny femmes.

The standalone question worth asking first: It is complete in one volume and needs nothing else, but it is not a romance in the genre sense — reviewers describe the ending as ambiguous yet satisfying, not a guaranteed pairing. If you like the voice, Dorn’s earlier Exalted was an LA Times Book Prize finalist and Vagablonde has the same appetite for satire.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Perfume & Pain a romance?

Not strictly. It is literary fiction with a central love triangle and plenty of desire, but the story is about Astrid’s career, sobriety and ego, and it does not follow romance genre conventions.

Does Perfume & Pain have a happy ending?

A hopeful one, not a romance HEA. Reviewers describe the ending as ambiguous yet satisfying, and some feel it runs a chapter or two past its best stopping point.

How spicy is Perfume & Pain?

A 3/5. The sex is explicit and frequent, but written with a comic, self-aware edge rather than as lingering romance-novel scenes.

Is Perfume & Pain a standalone?

Yes. It is a complete standalone novel from Simon & Schuster, published in May 2024, and it requires no other book.

Is there a Perfume & Pain audiobook?

Yes. Simon & Schuster Audio published it, narrated by Natalie Naudus, and it is available on Libro.fm.

Is Perfume & Pain being made into a TV show?

It is in development. Legendary Television acquired the rights in 2024, with Clea DuVall attached to write and direct a series adaptation.

If You Loved Perfume & Pain, Read These Next

For the same frank, messy, darkly funny approach to sex and obsession in a literary frame, go to Big Swiss. For the source material Dorn is riffing on, Odd Girl Out is the 1950s pulp triangle played straight. For the Highsmith side of Astrid’s imagination — obsession, longing and an older woman — read Carol. Browse more in our literary and character-driven lesbian fiction list, or head back to all our book reviews.

The Bottom Line

Perfume & Pain sets out to rewrite lesbian pulp for the age of the group chat, and much of it lands: the voice is genuinely funny, the perfume detail is specific and strange, and the satire of literary LA has real teeth. It is held back by a heroine half its readers find unbearable, a romance that never settles into a romance, and an ending that keeps going after it has made its point. If you can enjoy a narrator who is wrong about nearly everything — and you want your sapphic fiction steamy, mean and very funny — it is worth your time. Check Perfume & Pain on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Perfume & Pain ranks as a sharp, trade-acclaimed sapphic literary comedy — hilarious and steamy, held back by a deliberately divisive narrator and a baggy ending, and best approached for the voice and the satire rather than the romance.