How We Wrote the Book, Part 1, by Tania Sanchez

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ELASTIC GIRL: Everyone is special.
DASH: That's just another way of saying nobody is special.
-The Incredibles

Would people buy and read a book full of critical opinions written by two people passionate about the art of perfume? Would they accept that perfume was something worth loving when done well-which is to say, something worth loathing when done badly? Would they indulge the informed but idiosyncratic declarations of two obsessed weirdos prone to both panegyrics and lame jokes? Would they issue a call for our heads? Or would they yawn and consider it all beneath notice? There was one way to find out: write the damn thing, one smelly spritz at a time.

I met Luca via his blog, Perfume Notes, which he kept up for a few months in 2005, around the same time I was keeping up my blog, Brain Trapped in Girl's Body. (It's still up, in all its folly.) Our first collaboration was when I gave him thorough editorial feedback on his manuscript for The Secret of Scent after he explained, sheepishly, that his mother didn't read English, his wife wasn't interested in it, and his scientist friends were bad judges of literary merit. Then he stopped and I stopped blogging when our personal lives were independently unraveling, but we kept up a transatlantic correspondence that I found the source of laughter and perspective in unprecedented quality and quantity. We got to the point that we were finishing and beginning each other's sentences, and around the end of 2006 he phoned me to ask if I wouldn't consider writing a guide to perfume with him.

Of course I said no. Do I look like an idiot? Luca became semi-famous as the subject of Chandler Burr's The Emperor of Scent, which is how I first heard of him. The very best bits of Burr's book, the ones that threatened to make strangers fall in love, were the English translations of reviews Luca had written on perfume in 1992, in French, in his book Parfums: Le Guide. I'd never seen anyone write about anything like that, only maybe Nabokov in his better rhapsodies. They were prose poems full of analytical and synthetical leaps that the rest of us were too cowardly even to know we weren't making. Anyway, I had cautionary visions of a guy who tried to woo a roommate of mine by typing out for her poems by Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and sneaking in one of his own, unattributed; she read them happily, then stumbled on his and groaned, "This is awful!" Publish my writing on perfume next to his? No.

Right. Luca pointed out that he'd always wanted to write one in English and to do it properly, but he couldn't manage it on his own. The job was too big. He said I was the first person he'd ever considered up to the task. He believed I could do it. That we could do it. He liked my ideas and he liked my writing. Did I want to sit around doing articles about personal finance for the rest of my life? Good point. I'd always hoped for a vocation but had no idea it would be an actual call. I quit the job, put my stuff in storage, dropped off the cat with my sister, and bought a ticket.

Tania Sanchez, Luca Turin, Perfumes, guide, scent, fashion, smell, expert, Penguin Books, books