Reading Perfume & Pain felt like watching the L word for the first time. Fun, gossipy, pulpy novel about a problematic lesbian author struggling through her 30s. 

Both of Dorn’s novels have narrators that hold hatred for butch/masculine lesbians, which makes me cringe when reading, but this is a book meant to make the reader cringe, and it does serve the greater narrative of an unwell, self-centered but also self-loathing lesbian.