The setting is the city of Paris.

It's the 1970s and the story is a journey of discovery with long buried family secrets and the intoxicating power of perfume.

I'm Ann Bocock and welcome to "Between the Covers".

Alka Joshi's debut novel, "The Henna Artist" was an immediate New York Times bestseller.

It's now in development for a TV series.

Her second novel, "The Secret Keeper of Jaipur", also a bestseller continued the story of sisters Lakshmi and Radha.

The trilogy is now complete with the release of her latest book, the "Perfumist of Paris".

Please welcome Alka Joshi.

How are you?

I'm great, Ann, thank you.

Thank you for having me.

Your first book, "Henna Artist", transported me to another world and this century's old healing powers and herbal remedies and this was Lakshmi's story.

Well, fast forward 20 years later, we have a new storyteller we have a new story, and this is Radha's story.

Was it always going to be a trilogy?

No, not at all.

I think that came as a surprise to me too.

One of the things that happens as a writer and I didn't know this when I first started the journey, is that your characters actually start speaking to you and they have minds of their own about where they want to go and what they wanna do.

So you know, Moloch asked me to write book number two all, you know, about him and his journey.

And now Radha said, "Well, I wasn't in book two, what about me?"

So now I start writing about Radha and it just was an organic flow from one book to the other.

You are not the first author to tell me that their characters speak to them.

So I totally believe it, in this book the themes feel current.

We're talking the timeframe 50 years ago, but we're dealing with women's empowerment, finding your own voice, struggles that women have 50 years later, the same.

Yes, absolutely the same.

So what happened I think, is that the first two books the characters are reminiscent of people I actually know, as you know "The Henna Artist" was an alternate life I imagined for my mother.

So the main character of Lakshmi is actually my mother, but in living in a whole different universe.

And the second book also has Moloch in it.

And he is very much like my younger brother.

Very reliable, very trustworthy, just a gem.

And then what happened is that over the course of the two and a half years that I built those two books, I talked to about 10,000 readers.

I probably hold the world's record in the number of book clubs that an author has spoken to.

It's almost 900 at this point.

Wait 900?

Yeah.

Okay.

And this is mainly on Zoom because my first two books were published during the pandemic.

So, I think that in the last two years I have spoken to so many people, so many women in particular about their predicaments with worklife balance and the gender inequality and pay raises and all of these kinds of issues.

So the book number three in Radha's voice actually becomes my readers and all the things they've been telling me over the last several years.

I have to say, I would like to see another version like a scratch and sniff kids book with all of these scents and fragrances in here.

Because I learned so much about how to produce or how a scent is produced, I had no idea.

First of all there are the top notes and the middle notes and there are these rare ingredients.

How did you do the research?

Oh, this was fascinating.

So first of all, you know, I go online and try to figure out all the sources.

I check out some books and go deep into the perfume world.

And then, one of the producers of my TV series, I was telling him that I needed to find out more about perfume and talk to some people who are in the business.

He said, "I know exactly who you should talk to and she's in New York."

So, I went to New York and I talked to a wonderful woman, Anne Gottlieb, and she took me to one of the biggest fragrance houses.

And I saw all the labs, I saw the lab assistants, everybody's working.

And then she had me talk to a couple of master perfumers.

Then they recommended that I speak to some people in Paris.

So I flew to Paris and spoke to those people.

They recommended I speak to people in Grasse, which is in the southeastern part of France.

And they were also master perfumers there and all kind of formularies and everything.

Everybody was so kind and then they referred me to people in Lisbon.

So I went in this big journey to find out what a master perfumer does.

Okay, this will probably surprise you, but a master perfumer is not a certificate like a master's degree.

The way that one becomes a master perfumer is they memorize in their nose and of course then in their brain, 3000 scents, 3000 scents.

And so when they start developing a formula, they rely on their brain to say, "Okay, I think maybe, you know, quarter gram of sandalwood oil and maybe just a fraction of tea tree or rose or jasmine."

And they developed the scent in their brain and they can smell it in their brain.

I think that is amazing.

Then they forward their formula onto the lab assistants like Radha, who will put the scent together.

First of all, I didn't know until I read your book that there was such a thing as a master perfume and thank you for explaining that.

Your writing is so good and you describe this work so beautifully.

I would love it if you would read that paragraph about what the master perfume is doing at her desk.

You know what's so lovely about this passage is that I actually visited a, in Versaille, there is a perfume museum and, Jean Patou, do you remember this fragrance?

It was like a billion years ago.

This was his perfume organ that I saw and that I describe in the book.

"Each of our work areas resembles a church organ.

In front of us are three tiers of scent viles in a semicircle, almost 300 of them.

Leaving just enough space on the table for a tiny scale, a tray of pipettes, a jar of scent papers, each the width of a pencil and a notebook on which to record our trials.

I've organized my perfume organ according to families of scents.

First there are the powdery narcotic florals, orange blossom, demasque rose, lavender lily of the valley.

The next tier of bottles contains sweet juicy fruit fragrances like lemon, bergamot, mango.

There's a cluster of rugged green bouquets, pine needles and rosemary among them."

Pine needles, like who would've thought that that goes into scents?

"And of course the enduring profound gourmand family of like chocolate, vanilla, and clove.

The earthy woods take up the top row, vetiver, sandalwood rosewood and cedar among them."

That is beautiful.

And the, I can't get my brain around the 3000 scents that someone has to memorize.

Anyway, Radha's dream is to be a master perfumist.

She gets the job of a lifetime.

It's chosen to create a perfume based on a very famous painting.

It is Olympia by Manet.

So, once again, I'm going down the rabbit hole of Googling to find out about this subject.

She's fascinating.

Radha studied this painting for hours.

Did you?

I did, you know, my BA is in art history and so I love painting.

I've studied all of the different painters, all the different periods.

And I remembered this painting and I thought "Wouldn't it be wonderful if Radha uses a painting as her inspiration for this perfume that she's creating?"

And that one came to mind because for the first time, before that painting was created by Manet, for the first time you have a woman looking straight at the viewer and she is not apologetic, she is not being demure, she is not being any of those things.

She's just looking straight at the viewer like, "I see you."

And I love that because it empowers that woman, it empowers the model within that painting.

And it turns out she was much more than a model.

Yes Fascinating woman.

She might be your next book.

I don't know.

She was a painter in her own right, but she didn't get a chance to have the kind of promotion and publicity that somebody like Manet did because she was poor.

So she modeled in order to make her rent, basically.

You can't read the chapter about that and not go and look at the painting because it tells so much.

Now I get that you're, that you have an art history background.

[Alka] Yeah.

In the previous books, Radha had enormous heartbreak, in the first book, she is pregnant at the age of 13, she gives up this child.

Later she does marry and move to Paris.

But that's somewhat later.

And the storyline progresses.

And this became very interesting.

And I imagine challenging from your end, it goes from the adoption, which can be very heartbreaking and so many emotions, to later finding birth parents.

That's a tricky path, isn't it, to follow as you're writing?

Very tricky because there are three parties involved, right?

There is the actual adoptee, there are the adoptive parents and then there's the birth mother.

And those three people have to be very sensitively taken into account when you're writing about this.

Now, once again, remember I told you that "The Perfumist of Paris" is really a lot of my reader's voice is coming through.

Well, every time I would do an event, a book event and I would do an author talk, I would invariably have women come up to me and tell me about their adoption stories.

Whether they were teenage girls who then got pregnant and had to give up their baby.

Or whether they were parents who had adopted or a child who had been adopted and did they wanna know their birth parents or not.

It was wonderful to get this information just coming at me.

And I really do feel that these people were serving me, you know, information that I really needed in order to complete Radha's story.

You tackle it beautifully.

Did you ever waiver?

I'm not gonna give anything away.

No, no, you have to read the book to find out.

But did you waiver back and forth on how to approach this and how to resolve this I guess is how I'm trying to put it?

Yes, I did because so many of these three parties that I spoke about are conflicted about their relationship to one another.

And so, I had scenarios in which the adoptee Nikki is excited to meet his birth mother and scenarios where he's not excited.

Same thing with Radha.

Does she really want to meet the boy that she has not seen in 17 years and has tried really hard not to have anything to do with, she didn't wanna see the pictures that the adoptive mother was sending her.

She didn't wanna read the letters, nothing.

And so she also has several ways that she can react to this.

She can either, you know choose not to see him or she does see him.

And then how does she tell the story of, "I was with your father when I was 13 years old and then I had you."

Yeah, yeah, but very good.

And we won't divulge anything else, what happens there.

You have some really compelling female characters in this book and lot of complex relationships.

And I'm talking, let's say the motherinlaw, Florance, she was interesting, her boss Delphine and her friend Matilde.

Well they might be in some respects peripheral but they are really crucial to the storyline.

What is it about female relationships that makes a killer story?

I think that female relationships are the most important relationships really that women have, because female relationships can support us in whatever it is we're trying to do, but they can also destroy us.

There is something about the closeness that we feel with friendships with females that we may not always feel with, you know, with males.

And even, I think, sometimes with our partners we will tell our female friends all kinds of things we would never tell our partners.

So I think that these relationships are very dynamic.

I also think in each of my books, I'm trying to say, women deserve the right to make their own minds, make their own decisions about their future.

And very often it's women in their lives who will influence that decision making.

Of those three, of the motherinlaw and her boss and her best friend, which one was the most fun to write?

Florance I think was definitely the best because she is the motherinlaw and I wasn't quite sure whether she would remain antagonistic towards Radha or whether she might change her relationship with Radha.

So I played it both ways to see which way I wanted to go.

But what I like about her is that she is also hurting and then that really makes her act out in ways that I don't think she would normally have acted out had she been in a more loving situation.

You were born in India, you moved to to Iowa when you were nine years old.

I have to know what those early years were like for you.

Oh, they were really hard.

They were really hard, Ann because in 1967 when we first came here, the impression that most Americans had of India was that it was a third world country, it was an underdeveloped country, that people were hot, there were too many of them, maybe they were lazy.

And that embarrassed me and it also confused me because that's not the India I knew as a little girl.

And then it also infuriated me because I couldn't understand why people were so negative about my birth nation.

Well, when I first started writing these books, I didn't know that I was going to come up with answers to those questions.

And here we are five decades, six decades after I came to this country and I finally found my voice and the reason that Indians were poor at the time that the colonists left.

And I try to, in every single book, I try to inform and broaden the scope of people's understanding of India, which I think is working.

Okay, so recently I was at a book festival and I had given a talk and an older gentleman, you know, an American gentleman came up to me and said, "You know I had never thought about India in any other terms, but you have opened my eyes."

Which I think is the best kind of response you can get from everything.

Well you have two places in this book that are just vibrant and gor, we know India from the first two books and now we have Paris.

So I think you've done the best of that you could possibly do as far as picking locations.

How did you end up in Iowa?

Why did your parents move to Iowa?

My father came to the United States to get his doctorate in civil engineering.

So that was at Iowa State University and we were there for three years.

My dad completed not only a PhD but another master's in three years.

My dad's a very hard worker and I think so are we all.

And so are a lot of immigrants.

You know, we work really hard to get where we are.

And then he got his first job in St. Louis and then he got a transfer into Kansas City and that was when all three of us, my younger brother, my older brother and I flew to other points.

Your mother, from what I understand was the inspiration for the first book, "The Henna Artist".

Was she your biggest cheerleader?

Oh my goodness, yes.

My mom wanted me to have the life that she didn't get to have and.

Well, what would she have done if she could?

I think that my mother would have become a psychologist.

I think she was really good at reading people and that was what she was studying in her first year of college, when her father said, "You have to come home, we have an arranged marriage for you."

And then she never got to ever go back to school again or have a career of her very own.

So she said, "Alka, I'm gonna make sure that you get all of those things and you make your own decisions about your partner, your career, your children you make all of those.

I'm not going to interfere."

What a wise woman.

Yeah.

What was the best advice do you think she ever gave you?

She said, "Be your own person.

Don't try to imitate somebody else."

Because you know and that goes with everything, that goes in the style of dress, the jewelry, the way you speak, the way that you write or communicate with people.

Do, you know, do you, you do you and don't worry about anybody else.

And I always used to think, "Well, what I have to follow the trends, right?

I have to be like everybody else."

And she said, "Well maybe to a certain point but there is enough inside each one of us that can be very unique."

Wonderful, what a beautiful woman.

You're very lucky.

I am.

Not only are you a New York Times bestseller, not only were you a best seller out of the gate with your first book, which just doesn't happen, you decided to write this book I believe when you turned 60, you already had a successful advertising career.

Why?

There were a couple of factors into play.

I was running my own advertising and marketing business and then the 2008 recession really slowed that down.

That's the big mortgage crisis.

And so I thought, "Well, what am I gonna do while we wait for the recession to abate?"

'Cause it always does, right?

And my husband had been saying to me, "I think you can write novels.

I think you should write novels."

And I had not listened to him for 16 years.

[Ann] On anything or just on this?

So many things.

And then I thought, "Okay, all right, I'll try my hand at it.

Because there's an intensive two year program just down the street.

I can learn how to write a novel.

There's a couple of instructors there I really admire.

I like their work."

So, that's what I ended up doing.

And I loved what we were studying.

I loved the reading, I've always loved reading.

And then also at the same time I was going back and forth to India where my younger brother had bought a condo.

So I was taking mom and mom was sharing all kinds of things with me that I didn't know about her at that time.

'Cause I left, you know, I left home at 18.

I never, you know, lived with my parents again.

So I got to know my mom on a very different fundamental level as a girl, as a young bride, as a young mother.

When on your trips back to India, I assume, had you been to India before?

[Alka] Oh yeah, several times.

But this was different.

This was through your mother's eyes?

Yes it was through mom's eyes.

So we're going to the fruit market and she's telling me, "This is the fruit I love that I cannot get in the United States."

And she's telling me, "Okay, you know that dahl that I make, you know, these are the kind of beans that I use in my dahl."

And then we went to the sari bazaar and she said, "Don't pick out the sari's with the little mirrors on them.

Those are for village women, those aren't for us."

And each of these little details, they make it into the book in the form of one character or another speaking to another character.

Well, I'm going to tell you, you are inspiring for women that after 50 that want to change, want to do something else, you did it.

Isn't it lovely though?

We live in a society and an age where women can do that.

We live in a society and age where you don't have to say, "Well, my life is over, you know, I've retired, this is it."

We can go on to have second, third, fourth careers.

I know many people who have done that.

And yeah, it is fun to give that kind of inspiration to a lot of women.

And I hear that all the time in emails, in inperson events, in, you know, direct messaging on social media.

People are always like, "You know what?

I think I can do it too.

I'm gonna start doing this, I'm gonna start doing that."

So that's really cool.

Well, I think you need to add inspiration on the bio, I really do.

In the time that we have left, I wanna pivot a little bit from "The Perfumist of Paris" and focus on you a little more.

What's your favorite place to write?

Oh, my bed.

I like to write from my bed.

I didn't expect that, okay.

I like to write in my pajamas.

That's where I'm most comfortable, right?

So I have a couple of pillows behind me and usually my dog is sitting on the bed with me, she's a little terrier.

And I have my little lap table, and then, you know, I write and I have a, you know, usually a cup of tea by my bedside.

But to me that's wonderful.

We have in the bedroom a large window that overlooks the Monterey Bay.

So, every now and then I look up I look around and I'm like, "Oh."

Oh, I'm so sorry, but somebody has to, somebody has to see the bay.

I know you've traveled extensively.

Where haven't you been?

Where do you really wanna go?

You know, we're about to embark on a five city tour, my husband and I in May, and this is in service of my fourth novel.

So we're going to go to Prague, Barcelona Florence and Paris again, and then London.

And so, those are all places, you know I would love to visit.

You know, I kind of feel like I have been to all the places I really wanted to go to.

And, you know, I'm comfortable at home.

I'm kind, no, I'm a homebody.

I had a teacher in my MFA program and she said we should get Tshirts made for everybody that say, "Real writers don't go out", because it's true.

You know, if you're going to be focused on writing you are not going out.

You are staying at home.

You are cracking down on your writing and you're doing editing and revising.

Your books are full of mouthwatering food.

Every one of the books has recipes in them.

So I assume your mother was a great cook.

You must be a great cook.

Is there a favorite recipe?

Well, my family loves Alu Gobi Sabji, and that is cauliflower, potato sabji and sometimes chicken curry, and then of course rice and then naan, which are the, you know large flat breads and a mango pickle.

Ooh.

Yeah.

All good.

Yeah.

But I will tell the readers, look in the back of the book, there is always gonna be a recipe.

What is it that you would tell nine year old Alka who has just arrived in Iowa?

If you could talk to her.

I would say be patient.

All will be revealed as you age.

And don't get stuck on any one thing in your life because you are going to change, it's going to change and it'll evolve into something completely different.

It'll evolve into a third thing that you may never have imagined.

So just be open to all kinds of possibilities.

Don't you think all girls need to hear that?

Yes, yes, we definitely do.

We need to not hear that we have to be like everybody else and dress like everybody else in order to fit in.

In fact, I think that some of the most interesting people I know, never fit in.

They felt like they weren't fitting in in school.

They felt like they didn't fit in at work, but, you know, it helped them develop into very interesting people who were doing their own things in their own right.

Well, I don't know what the fourth book is going to be but I suspect there's going to be some really interesting women in that one as well.

Any hint?

Oh, no, no, no, no.

Okay.

Nothing revealed until it's out.

The latest book and the third book in the trilogy is "The Perfumist of Paris", which we, the first one "Henna Artist" we're going to see on the screen before too long.

So, I'm thrilled about that.

I am assuming it is going to be filmed in India.

Yes, in Jaipur, because you can't duplicate Jaipur in Los Angeles or New York or Toronto.

Well, I cannot wait to see what you have in store for us next.

It has been a real pleasure to talk to you.

I, thank you so much for spending time with us.

Thank you, Ann, for inviting me and inviting me into your world "Between the Covers".

I'm Ann Bocock, please join me on the next "Between the Covers".