Dolly Alderton: ‘I couldn’t write another book about yet another heartbroken woman’

Sunday Life’s most popular cover stories of 2023See all 11 stories.

Like so many 20-something women, I have turned to Dolly Alderton’s writing for solace. I came to her after a break-up in my early 20s, when someone gave me their well-worn copy of Everything I Know About Love, her bestselling memoir. It chronicled her roaring 20s, detailing everything from 4am taxis and the homes of unsuitable men to mouse-infested flatshares. It showed me that I wasn’t the only one finding early adulthood immensely difficult.

The book, published in 2018, has sold more than 800,000 copies and last year was adapted into a BBC TV series. A male friend of mine once asked, “What’s that yellow book girls always have?” because he’d noticed how many of the women he’d slept with had it on their bedside tables.

“Someone messaged me the other day saying there was a bloke walking around a club with a copy so that girls would come over to him to talk about it,” Alderton, 35, tells me from her postbox-red sofa, rearranging the sleeves of her Breton-striped T-shirt.

Mining her own life for content was what Alderton was, and for many still is, best known for. Her second book, Ghosts, published in 2020, was fictional but readers drew comparisons between her and the protagonist, Nina, because the book shared themes with her memoir — friends drifting away when they find a romantic partner, the highs and lows of dating etc.

Despite the subject matter of her writing, some of Alderton’s friends doubt she is as hung up on finding love as many readers would assume.Credit: Sane Seven/The Sunday Times Magazine/News Licensing

Her new novel, Good Material, is different. It is still written from the perspective of someone recently heartbroken, but this time it’s a man called Andy. The detail is luscious, from the folder in Andy’s phone titled “Bald”, where he stores photos of the back of his head, to the doomsday prepper he ends up lodging with who likes sending letters to Julian Assange.

“I couldn’t write another book about yet another heartbroken woman, it would just be too depressing. I’m sitting here in a flat I bought with heartbreak,” Alderton explains, gesturing around her. Her cat, Goldie, named after Goldie Hawn, languishes on the jute carpet.

“I wanted to stretch myself,” she continues, taking a forkful of strawberry cake (not homemade), which she’s just taken out of the oven for us. “I wanted to write about someone who couldn’t be compared to me.

“I’d spent my 20s writing about my sex and dating life every week in a column, posting pictures of myself daily on a walk or with my flatmates, and I had this growing feeling that it didn’t serve me any more. I felt out of control with my career, social media was stressful, the conversations around me were stressful.”

Alderton was born to a Canadian mother and British father. They named her Hannah but she switched to Dolly in her early teens. She grew up in the north London suburb of Stanmore. “Morrissey once described his teenage life as ‘waiting for a bus that never came’,” she writes in Everything I Know About Love about an adolescence spent in a bland cul-de-sac.

“I felt out of control with my career, social media was stressful, the conversations around me were stressful.”

DOLLY ALDERTON

Alderton attended a private all-girls school. “I was one of those kids at school about whom the teachers would always say, ‘If she spent less time trying to entertain the class and more time listening…’” She studied drama and English at university and did a master’s degree in journalism.

Her blog about the messy life of a 20-something secured her a job as a writer on the scripted reality show Made in Chelsea. She started writing a dating column for The Sunday Times Style magazine in 2015, when she was 26. The High Low podcast followed in 2017. And then Everything I Know About Love changed her world.

However, turning her private life into a product took its toll and she sought professional help. “I started with this therapist when I was 30 and she said to me, ‘The way you’re living, with your career, who you are, some people could carry on like this. You can’t. You’re not robust enough for people to know about your private life on this scale. What got you here won’t get you there.’”

So she changed tack, from dating columnist to “Dear Dolly” agony aunt, from memoirist to novelist. In 2020, while going through a painful break-up, she embarked on Good Material. She undertook months of research, asking men of all ages, backgrounds and personality types about heartbreak, love, relationships and sex.

Despite the subject matter of her writing, some of Alderton’s friends doubt she is as hung up on finding love as many readers would assume. She recounts a story about returning home from a holiday in Greece with a friend in the wake of the break-up that inspired Good Material.

“I’d complained a lot about how I’d been mostly single for 10 years. On the way back, we had to take a bus and a boat and this good-looking guy sat next to us. And Caroline, who is married, made conversation with him for two hours. She said she looked over and watched me in my own world, reading my book and staring out of the window, and she had this realisation: Dolly does not want a boyfriend. She has wanted to be single for 10 years.”

Alderton is hopeful that the mould is loosening and that more women will feel comfortable outside a relationship. “It takes a huge amount of bravery because there aren’t that many women doing the same,” she says. “It’s a historic response to feel panic at being left behind. Like you’re not cool, not normal, not feminine. But with every generation, more and more women will see that it’s okay to want to be on your own. We will stop seeing it as sad or transgressive.”

I ask her how she found turning 30. Difficult, it transpires, “especially when you’ve spent a large portion of your 20s capitalising off being in your 20s, it can be a shock to have to leave them”.

Initially she says she was acting out. “I was dating inappropriate men – not bad people, just people who weren’t at the same life stage as me. I fell in love but it was also, on an unconscious level, a resistance to choose sensibly. I went out drinking a lot, started wearing crop tops, getting tattoos and holes in my ears.” She pulls her hair back to reveal a stack of chunky gold hoops running down her lobe.

“At the moment where everyone I knew was trying for children, getting married or saving up for houses – moving to the home counties because they can’t afford London – I did the opposite. What I realise now is that you can design your own version of what a 30-year-old is.”

Her version of a 30-something looks pretty impressive to me, with her delicately tiled bathroom and bookshelves filled with the works of Joan Didion. She shows me her diary for the week, listing back-to-back press engagements for Good Material, gallery dates with Pandora Sykes, theatre, work meetings, dinners, dates. “I’m out four or five nights a week. I work all the time because I find work really fun. But the other thing I love is life – and I won’t compromise on that, either.”

“I was dating inappropriate men – not bad people, just people who weren’t at the same life stage as me.”

DOLLY ALDERTON

There’s this thing that tends to happen when women reach a certain level of acclaim. In the beginning, the woman does some brilliant work, everyone loves it, says she’s the “voice of a generation”, and the thing gains more and more traction.

How does Alderton feel about being called the voice of a generation? “I don’t like people foisting those sorts of titles on me, suggesting that I represent Millennial women or anything generational. That makes me feel very uncomfortable. It’s flattering, but it’s not something I set out to do.”

She lifts her legs onto a paisley foot rest and sinks further back into the sofa. “I love to defend [Normal People author] Sally Rooney. I’ve heard people in the industry debate whether she deserves all the accolades because there’s so much sycophancy around her work. It’s amazing to me how many people think she’s responsible for that, that she set out to do it, like it’s her fault everyone fell in love with her books.”

She recounts a time at the Wilderness Festival a few years ago when she was queueing for the loo. “These two lovely girls who were completely off their heads came over and were talking at me about the book. I was, like, ‘I’m so sorry, can you hold on one minute? I’m just desperate for the toilet,’ and ran into the cubicle. Anyway they were in the next cubicle and I could overhear them slagging me off, like, ‘I thought her whole thing was that she’s meant to be friendly.’

“When I was looking over Good Material I realised I am proudest of this book because even though it’s the most fictional thing I’ve written, the pain it came from was one of the most real experiences of my life. I took one of the worst years of my life, for lots of reasons – one of them being heartbreak – and I made something funny out of it.”

Her willingness to offer her own experiences to entertain us and make us laugh is part of what makes Alderton so fun to be around. It’s also what made her so good at writing about herself. But this need to be liked, to offer herself up for people’s approval, is also the reason Alderton can’t do it any more.

“Nora Ephron wrote this essay 20 years after Heartburn was published in which she said that people always call it a ‘thinly veiled memoir’. She said that people wouldn’t regard it as fiction because it was based on events that happened in her own life. She was like, ‘I took the biggest tragedy of my life and turned it into something funny. And if that’s not mastering fiction, what is?’”

Good Material (Fig Tree) by Dolly Alderton is out now.

The Times (UK)

Make the most of your health, relationships, fitness and nutrition with our Live Well newsletter. Get it in your inbox every Monday.