As we’ve announced, and as you very well may have heard elsewhere, Alyssa Harad has just published a memoir titled Coming to My Senses: A Story of Perfume, Pleasure, and an Unlikely Bride (and if you missed it, see the excerpt we posted yesterday). It’s a highly readable and moving account of the year in which Alyssa married her longtime beau and developed an obsessive interest in perfume, and a meditation on the ways that those two turning points brought her to think differently about her own identity as a woman and a writer.

Since I consider Alyssa a friend and we all know her as a Now Smell This contributor, I’ll be having an e-mail “question and answer” conversation with her rather than writing a traditional book review.

Alyssa will be checking in throughout the day, so if you have a question or comment of your own, please do share it.

Jessica: On a personal note, I completely empathized with the early chapters of your book, in which you recall your graduate education and the reasons that perfume would have been viewed with distrust as a “romantic distraction” in that world. I understand that experience all too well, having tried to suppress my love for fashion and perfume and cosmetics during my own long grad-school career! Do you think there’s some shared sensibility that accounts for all the academics-turned-scent-obsessives in the online fragrance-world, or is it just coincidence or the law of averages?

Alyssa: I’ve noticed there are not only a lot of former (and current) academics in the perfume blogosphere, but plenty of writers, librarians, curators, and scientists, too. The book polls on Now Smell This also suggest that perfumistas in general are big readers…

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