Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love is the book for the girls (and also the guys trying to impress those girls). Packed with comical anecdotes, strange recipes and satirical email exchanges, Alderton bundles the funny, embarrassing and heartbreaking aspects of growing up as a girl into 358 pages.
Born in 1988, Dolly Alderton is a British journalist, author and podcast host. Her 2018 debut novel Everything I Know About Love was shortlisted in the British Book Awards and earned a National Book Award. Despite the references to various places in England, her story resonates with teenagers around the world.
With quips about almost getting married to a stranger or accidentally getting drunk at ten years old, she recounts navigating her anxious teenage years, chaotic 20s and eventually finding peace in her 30s. Alderton describes the universal experiences for today’s women: growing up with the internet, her struggles with alcohol and food, feeling left behind in life, trying to find romantic love and above all, navigating female friendships.
Reading Dolly Alderton’s memoir is like being guided through life by an older sister. Her voice manages to be comforting, even when she describes her most chaotic experiences of chasing parties and 200 dollar taxi rides. You laugh at her exploits and cry for her losses. You recognize yourself in her actions, like when she says, “I wrote a sad soliloquy about it on my iPhone notes on the night bus home” or when she overthinks her relationship, turning it into a Spice Girls metaphor.
Alderton’s 2018 memoir was released to glowing praise from critics and amateurs alike. Author Lisa Taddeo called it a “one-sitting, break-up recovery book,” while author Elizabeth Day referred to Alderton as the “Nora Ephron for the millennial generation.” Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote Eat, Pray, Love, encapsulates the book in two sentences: “what makes this memoir more than mere entertainment is the mature and sophisticated evolution that Alderton describes in these pages. It’s a beautifully told journey and a thoughtful, important book.” With a four-star rating out of almost 300,000 reviews on Goodreads, it is a must read for anyone struggling with the trials and tribulations of girlhood.
Before Alderton had even begun to write, the TV rights had been acquired by Working Title Films, whose movies include Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love Actually. But unlike these classic early 2000s films, Everything I Know About Love portrays a more modern and realistic love story of female friendship. It is available to stream on Peacock with a promising Rotten Tomatoes rating of 94 percent.
This is the book to read when you dread your 16th birthday or keep a gripping countdown to graduation. For fans of Alderton, check out her most recent novel Good Material, her work as a columnist for The Sunday Times or her current affairs podcast The High Low. For fans of Everything I Know About Love, check out the TV series about the story, her podcast Love Stories or Florence Kleiner’s blog (I cried).
