Important highlights from the class:

• Do not buy any perfume based on how it smells in the bottle, on paper or after the first few minutes on your skin.  It really is true that scents interact differently with different body chemistry (we smelled the same scent on different people to test this).  Also, it changes over time from the top to the middle to the base note.  I was sniffing myself all day.
• Don’t feel pressured by salespeople and don’t listen to their opinions about what might be right for you.  Or your ideas about what kind of person you are so the scents you should like.  One of the most interesting and compelling perfumes turned out to have a top note of gasoline, so leave those preconceptions at the door and go for what you like based on smelling it.
• Sadly, since this was a blindish smell test, I did not find out until just now that my favorite perfume from the day costs $250.   I guess my sister is right and I am like “Sarah Parker from that sex show” after I’m in New York for a few hours.

Hamilton structures her story well, moving forward and backward in time to illuminate the mistakes/choices she made and why she made them. After ten years in catering kitchens in New York, she cannot put to rest the idea that she should be doing something more “worthy” and heads off to Ann Arbor for an MFA in writing. (This is not a memoir that pretends to be written by a non-writer.) The alienating academic language and culture drive her back to the kitchen and a woman she meets working there gives her a first glimpse of the possibilities of her own restaurant. A restaurant that gives patrons a taste of childhood comfort and being cared for by the mother that she has not seen for twenty years. On her return to New York she makes such a restaurant.

As I wrote about on the desk set, my attraction to books and libraries was given to me by my parents, and in many ways at work I try to give that comfort and feeling of being recognized to my young patrons and their parents. I have frequently felt that I should be doing more or other than that.  Blood, Bones, and Butter is a rare memoir of vivid convincing detail and compelling story that resonated with my experience of working life.

Prune, Hamilton’s restaurant, is what they call a labor of love which means she works ridiculous hours. By the end of the book she also has two tiny sons to care for as well as an unfathomable husband. She is searching for balance but unwilling to compromise on career or family or writing a beautiful honest book at the same time. For this reader, attempting to balance all these often unspoken and complex internal drives- for family, success, and art- Hamilton’s tale is as bitterly refreshing as a perfect negroni.

The last four books she’s written are Northern noir: nightmarish tales of children in peril and mysterious strong but flawed women. They are puzzled over by the violent, inept, but morally sound and dogged unaffiliated investigator Jackson Brodie. The latest volume sticks to Leeds and darkest Yorkshire, (where my own gloomy relatives originated) and has the satisfactions of a solid police procedural in a vivid and disturbing setting. And I found it by chance, googling the line from Emily Dickinson that Atkinson took as her title.

Atkinson is speaking tomorrow night at Porter Square Books in Cambridge