I spoke with Neroli Lacey about her debut novel, The Perfumer’s Secret. Her book is a page turner, a feast for the senses, and a love story.
The Perfumer’s Secret is a love story to southern France, the region in and around Grasse where the Med meets the Alps. And it’s a love story to French culture, craftsmanship and tradition. And finally, it’s a love story between two very different people. You’ve got a dynamic plot and a sublime setting. Reading the book made me want to hop on a plane to Nice.
Neroli’s book centres around a gutsy, young, Manhattan based documentary maker named Zandy, who turns her lens on a legendary perfume maker in the south of France that happens to be celebrating its 300th anniversary.
Zandy has been assigned this story by her boss. She’s not thrilled about what looks like a puff piece, only to discover there’s a lot more to this perfume house than pressed flowers, a dashing CEO to start, and a family history that doesn’t smell so fragrant. The story is not black and white. The truth doesn’t always tell the whole story, which is one reason why I loved this book. Below are the edited highlights of my lively chat with Neroli. You can listen to the full episode here on my podcast Elena Meets the Author or wherever you listen to podcasts. Even better, we are giving away the e-book on the show notes of the episode.
ELENA: Neroli, let’s start by discussing the themes of The Perfumer’s Secret. How would you describe them?
NEROLI: Well, first of all, thank you for that amazing description. You really captured this particular corner of France and the tradition of craft here. So, thank you for that.
I think the central theme of the book is that there’s no such thing as a single truth, everybody has their own truth, and the truth is made up of a multifaceted version of everybody’s story.
ELENA: That makes sense to me. I was thinking that even at the very beginning of the book when Zandy is having her little fling with Luke, he says something like that… That there are so many different ways to see the world which echoes your theme.
That was quite intentional. As a novelist, you’re like a puppeteer, dropping a little bit of the theme in for the reader’s subconscious mind to start thinking about.
ELENA: You wrote in your newsletter that some writers spend their life building up to the novel they were meant to write. Do you consider The Perfumer’s Secret the novel you were meant to write? And how did your life before this book prepare you to be a novelist?
Well, I’ve done a lot of things on the way to writing this book. I was a journalist for many years. I wrote for all the great British newspapers, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Evening Standard. I’ve been an investment banker and a commodity futures trader. I’ve travelled all over the world.
I’m the proud mother of two wildly spirited daughters and an adventurous stepson. I have been training my whole life to do this work and I’m now living the life of my dreams.
So, to answer the first part of your question, is this the ultimate book? I think it was the book I was meant to write then. It’s been two years in the publishing process. For me as a writer, I’m constantly raising the bar of where I want to be. So, I think it’s a balancing act between being content with the work that you put out in the world, slowing down a minute and being happy with the work that you’ve done and celebrating that. And at the same time, learning to write character. I’ll be doing that, please God, for the rest of my life. There is no way to master this. It’s a never-ending journey.
ELENA: Did you always know you’d love to be a novelist?
You know, I did, but I didn’t dare take the step. I think two things, you can’t pay the bills as a novelist unless you’re, I don’t know, Kristen Hanna or Emily Henry or Colleen Hoover and maybe back then in my twenties and thirties and forties, it wasn’t quite the right time for me.
I knew because reading books made me feel alive in a way that nothing else did. Perhaps only my beloved family. But then it’s a long journey to have the courage to pursue that there’s a lot of why me and can I do this and so on.
I think what I’ve learned most from this experience not just of writing – I’ve written three novels and I’m just beginning my fourth now- this is the first one to be published – but what I have learned is certainly in terms of publishing the book and now engaging with the world with my work, I have really learned to follow your spark.
If you have a certain spark, listen to it. You don’t have to have the path to get there. You take one step and the path appears. And for me it was a very long journey.
ELENA: Love it. Great. Thank you. Why did your mother choose to call you Neroli? And how fitting that perfume began with a woman named Princess Nerola.
My mother was a trailblazing, extraordinary woman who, in the 1940s, began trading essential oils. Those are the oils which come from pressing flowers. She wanted to be a journalist. So, she started off in journalism on Fleet Street, where the newspapers are in London.
And her father saw her coming out of a pub and said, ‘That’s it, no daughter of mine is ever going to be a journalist.’ He placed an advert in The Times for a secretary offering her services with fluent French and German. My mother was hired by a trading firm in in the city of London. That’s like Wall Street.
And she soon became their top trader. By 1949, the bank had come to her saying the business was in trouble and would she buy it, which she indeed did. She travelled all over the world trading commodities, all through my childhood, taking me hither and thither, including to Grasse.
She was a remarkable woman, sort of like Margaret Thatcher. In the trade she sold a lot of lemongrass. I’m a twin and the trade press said, Mrs Eileen Day Lawson has given birth to twins. Surely, they’re going to be called Citronella and Lemongrass, which luckily, we weren’t.
We were called Neroli and Virginia. And Neroli is named after Princess Nerola, from a province in the north of Italy. She used to perfume her gloves and her love letters to the princes of the courts around Europe with this incredible bitter orange blossom. So, she’s thought to be the founder of the use of perfume in the West. And that’s why my mother called me Neroli.
ELENA: This book was meant to be.
I think it was.
ELENA: I wanted to say that not only was this book a joy to read, but I learned a lot. You have so many intriguing facts. I had no idea that one’s sense of smell is 10,000 times stronger than any of our other faculties.
And that there’s a museum dedicated solely to violets in Tourette sur Loup, a medieval village in the foothills of France, where your novel takes place.
Which came first, the idea of the novel or, having a holiday home in Tourette sur Loup?
Very much the home. We were living, if you can believe it, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. My husband’s work took us there. I grew up in Kensington in London. Minneapolis was a very foreign place to me. And it was Arctic cold. We were raising two small daughters. So, it was absolute madness to buy a holiday home in the southeast corner of France near the border with Italy where the mountains come down to the sea.
It was bonkers, but it was love. We used to come basically just at Christmas when the girls were small and couldn’t leave the school year and so on. As they say in France, it was ‘un coup de foudre’, love at first sight.
The more time we spent here, we hiked in the mountains, and we got to know the ways of the old stone village and the crafts and the slower pace of life and the traditions. And I realized that I had to write a love letter. I’m in love with the mountains. I look out at the beautiful Alps. I had to write a love letter to this landscape and that’s how The Perfumer’s Secret came to being.
ELENA: Was the novel inspired by any particular story?
No, it was inspired by this landscape and by wanting to write a love letter. Then I had to figure out what kind of a story I could tell. It wasn’t something that came fully formed.
I had put myself on a regime of two pages a day. I mean, you can’t call yourself a writer if you don’t write two pages a day, right? So, I put myself on this regime, two pages a day which sometimes is hard, because what are you going to write about?
So, on one particular day, we were on a train up the East Coast to Connecticut to see my daughter at school. And I hadn’t written my pages, and I was tearing my hair out saying to my husband on the train, I don’t know what I’m going to write about, and I can’t go to bed before I’ve written these two pages.
And he said, ‘you’ve got to put a secret in there.’ He’s read a thousand mystery novels. I grew up in England having read a lot of literary fiction, which haven’t got much of a story. And it was such fun to hear his ideas about the engine of story and turning pages.
So, he gave me a few hints. Writing is such a solitary process. It’s really fun to share it, especially if you have a husband who’s excited about it like mine is. And so, I can actually remember that moment when the secret came into the story.
ELENA: Last question, can you recommend any book for our listeners?
Oh, I certainly can. Thank you for asking that question. If you’re only going to read one book this year, read Isola by Allegra Goodman. It’s got a gorgeous cover. It’s set in 16th century Périgord, France, I had zero interest in 16th century France.
But believe me, this character, you’re going to go crazy for this character. And it’s an amazing story. This is the novel that this writer has been working towards. I think for the whole of her life. It is fantastic book. I think it’s going to be my favourite book of 2025.
ELENA: Well, that is it for my questions, Neroli. Thank you so much for such great answers and stories.
Thank you, Elena. It’s amazing to have somebody else read your work and appreciate the things that you were trying to communicate. And what’s more fun than talking about books?
ELENA: Nothing. It was all a pleasure.
March, 2025
