The perfect man does exist, says Dolly Alderton. He’s just a bit hard to find

Bestselling author, 21st-century agony aunt and podcaster Dolly Alderton has made a career from oversharing her private life. She’s flawed, she’s funny, she swears and sometimes stays out late and drinks too much. No wonder she’s many Millennial women’s fantasy best friend.

After writing about her dating exploits in the 2010s, the British journalist quickly established herself as a doyen of confessional writing, her wit and unflinching truthfulness earning her an almost rock-star like fandom.

When she appears on my screen over Zoom, she’s exactly as you’d expect: a bit flustered (it’s morning in the UK) but immediately funny, self-deprecating and chatty.

“I’m really tired,” she explains, apologising for being late. “I’ve had one of those weeks when it’s like, all of work and all of life has happened simultaneously and … I find it really hard to do them at the same time.”

Alderton is making her first visit to Australia in November for a series of live shows, which quickly sold out. We are, she says, her biggest readership outside of England. And Australian fans are among her favourites.

“Me and [writer] Caroline O’Donoghue both have really solid readerships in Australia, and she and I always say the same thing about our Australian fans – they don’t give us a moment’s shit,” she says.

I find it hard to believe Alderton gets much negative feedback, but fame, of course, will always invite derision. Not that Alderton is bothered. “I don’t know why but it’s only English girls that cause me all the problems! But Australian readers and listeners – everything you say, they take in good faith.”

Alderton’s live show is part book tour for her latest novel, Good Material, and part interview. “And then the second part is questions from the audience, which becomes more ‘live’,” she says.

Being an advice columnist, she’s not daunted by audience questions, so often dreaded by authors. “One of my best friends asked me if I could do a wedding speech for her next month, and the thought of standing up in a pub down the road from me – it’s 100 people I know – and writing a speech about this person I’ve grown up with, and reading it aloud from a piece of paper … that terrifies me,” she says. “But the thought of doing three nights back-to-back in the Sydney Opera House with a room full of strangers literally doesn’t. I will not have a shred of fear about those nights.”

Alderton is many a Millennial Woman’s fantasy best friend.Credit: NYT

She’s rarely shocked by the questions she gets, having done live shows for the past six years - but she does have people submit questions ahead of time. “My audiences are like, girls on the white wine having a good time, and we found we couldn’t get the mics off them!” (Her crowds are, she says, usually a sea of women, “with the occasional boyfriend who’s been dragged along, clutching a pint to his chest”.)

As well as questions about romance and friendship, she gets lots of “lifestyle” questions. “In the vein of ‘what would be your last meal on Earth?’ and ‘Would you rather get with Mr Big or Aiden?’” (Aiden for the record. Also for the record: these are fictional Sex and the City characters.)

“Really, I think someone between the two. I’ve realised what most women want now, I think.”

Do tell? “I think most women want the package and the presence of an alpha male and the personality of their female best friend,” Alderton says. “You want the man who, when you turn off the lights, you feel like you’re at a sleepover with a best friend, just laughing and giggling.”

Does that man exist? “I think he does, but I think you have to … do a lot of dating to find him!”

Alderton should know, given her much-catalogued experiences as a single woman: after a stint as a story producer on the British reality show Made in Chelsea, her journalism career began in 2015 when she joined The Sunday Times′ Style magazine as a “dating expert”. For two years she wrote about her own dating life, often in excruciating detail, before writing her bestselling memoir at 25. Everything I Know About Love, which chronicled a decade of her relationships, one-night-stands and female friendships, won her a legion of fans, the 2018 National Book Award for autobiography, and in 2022, a television adaptation.

Bel Powley (left) and Emma Appleton in the TV adaptation of Alderton’s memoir Everything I Know About Love.

In 2018, she also started podcast The High Low with friend and fellow journalist Pandora Sykes, covering pop culture and current affairs, which ran for four years, and had 30 million downloads, and two years later she became the Sunday Times’ agony aunt with her Dear Dolly column pitched firmly at Millennial women. Then came her first novel, Ghosts, about a woman whose boyfriend “ghosts” her, which cemented her as the British Nora Ephron.

You want the man who, when you turn off the lights, you feel like you’re at a sleepover with a best friend.

Alderton loves Ephron’s books – she once described the American journalist and author as her “patron saint of everything” – but grew up reading a varied diet; her mum, she says, is a serious bookworm. “Not even as a hobby but as like, an identity,” Alderton says. “There were always towers of books in my house, so that was my sort of library. I would pick up whatever my mum was reading – all those huge hit books of the ’90s or the noughties, that women my mum’s age were reading, like Chicken Soup For The Soul, Bridget Jones, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing.”

Her mum would also place books she wanted her daughter to read in strategic places.

“She has since told me that, in a very British passive-aggressive way, she would put books about sex out, but on a slightly elevated shelf, so I would feel like I was breaking the rules,” Alderton says. “She left The Joy of Sex out for me to read. She also had some Mills and Boons and I loved them.

“This will sound like a basic thing to say, but I love great comic, romantic literature that sits right in the middle of commercial and literary. So I read every Nick Hornby, I read Helen Fielding, I read David Nicholls. That is for me, my main literary diet. When it’s done well, I think there is no better, more relaxing, more stimulating reading experience.”

Alderton herself is surely on that list these days, given her global book sales, and fans including Lena Dunham and Elizabeth Gilbert.

Now, with Good Material, she’s added a new demographic to her readership: men. A tale of heartbreak told from the male perspective, it’s the story of 35-year-old comedian Andy, who’s trying to make sense of his breakup from his girlfriend of four years. Alderton went the full Ephron for this one, interviewing more than a dozen male friends and colleagues to gain a man’s perspective.

Dolly Alderton’s latest novel has brought her an all-new readership demographic: men.Credit: NYT

“I even had a hair-loss consultant, who is one of my best friends - a devastatingly handsome man who I’ve known for 10 years and he began with a full head of hair,” she explains. “I’ve always been fascinated and wanted to ask him about it … but for some reason I felt like I couldn’t. But when it was under the guise of ‘professional research’, he could become my hair-loss consultant.”

She also had a masturbation “consultant”; in the book, one of Andy’s mates gives him advice on, ahem, wanking. “Yes, I did ask men about masturbation! I know enough about men, about how they are when women are in the room because I hang out with men, whether that’s romantically or platonically. What my research was really for was, what are men like when there are no female witnesses? What are their friendships like? What are their thoughts? What is their inner sexual life? I interviewed about 15 men, and they were really, really open with me.”

She was especially interested in men’s internal landscapes during heartbreak, and how, or if, they sought solace or advice from male friends. (Spoiler alert: not really.)

“I have numerous ‘safe spaces’ where I can house my emotional life,” says Alderton. “I have the friend I go to when I’m suffering with anxiety – I have a therapist for that as well; the friend I go to when I’m having a big professional problem; the friend I go to for romantic advice. Most women have this set of people where they can explore their feelings and most men, I think, don’t have that traditionally.”

For the first time, Alderton now has straight male readers. “People send me photos of men reading it on the Tube,” she says. “But the main feedback that I’ve got, which was the feedback I was most craving, is that the man I wrote is a believable man.”

And it’s not just British men on public transport – after Everything I Know About Love found a second life on American BookTok, Good Material has launched Alderton in the US, making it on to the New York Times bestseller list.

When we talk, she’s just back from a US book tour, has signed with an American agent, and even, much to her horror, appeared on morning television.

“For me to sit on that sofa and talk for five minutes … it was the scariest professional thing I’ve ever done,” she says. Really? “I hate doing TV. I always turn down stuff.”

For the US though, she acquiesced. “Because America is a world rather than a country, and it takes so long to establish yourself as a writer there, so when the opportunity came up, I thought, I am going to kick myself in years to come if I squander this,” she says. “But I had to do everything bar what I wanted to do, which was sink two martinis and have a Valium before I went on.”

She found “natural” ways to calm herself down instead. “My presence is great in the pub, great on stage, great in a studio recording. I just don’t think I’m right on screen.”

We can expect to see her name on screen rolling by in the credits of upcoming television projects though: in the US and at home, Alderton has several on the go. None of which she can really talk about. But she did “take meetings” in LA. “Every cliche is true, although I did love it there,” she says. Apart from the early nights.

“In London, I’ll meet someone for dinner at seven and get home at 12.30,” she says. “It’s martinis and wine and lots of food and then someone maybe runs to the corner shop and we’re all going to have one cigarette. And maybe a karaoke bar. In LA, you meet someone for dinner at six and everyone’s in their car by half-seven!”

An adaptation of Good Material is already in development, as well as projects she describes as “juicy”.

“I always get in trouble with these conversations – what I can say is that I’ve basically taken a year off from writing novels and I’m focusing on TV and film projects,” she says, apologising for being enigmatic. “Do I sound like a politician?”

Alderton is a lot of things, but I can’t imagine her as an MP. Just don’t call her the voice of a generation. She’s flattered when people – many people – call her that, but makes it clear that those are not self-assigned epithets.

“I have never sat down and written, trying to represent every person of my generation because I can’t. I’m a very specific flavour of human, personality-wise, as we all are, and also experience-wise in context and privilege and background,” she says.

“I’m very over-represented; there are a lot of girls in England who grew up somewhere around London, who went to private school and university and worked in media. But that’s not the majority experience – there’s a huge majority experience that isn’t represented enough.”

For the thousands of fans with tickets to her sold-out Australian shows though, her voice alone, regardless of what it represents, is enough.

An Evening with Dolly Alderton is at Sydney Opera House, November 5, 6 & 7; Perth Concert Hall, November 10; Palais Theatre, Melbourne, November 13; Hamer Hall Melbourne, November 14; QPAC Brisbane, November 17.