Dolly Alderton is done with autofiction*
*According to her, not me.
In 2018, Dolly Alderton published Everything I Know About Love, a book that quickly became stratospherically successful in the UK. In 2024, I saw a man reading it at the 72nd St. Q train subway station and got the ick. It’s literally the most performative book a man could possibly read; I feel like they shouldn’t be allowed to touch it. To me, it feels like a sacred text of womanhood. It’s the type of book that every girl should read, and no man should have access to. It encapsulates the female experience so well; yes, being young, fun, and broke - but also, the power of female friendship, a dynamic too often misrepresented in popular culture as catty and petty. Dolly is a female friendship evangelist and Everything I Know About Love is her swan song. It’s THE book for any girl who doesn’t know where she’d be in the world without her group of friends (someone I know cried watching the TV show’s trailer…humiliating. It was me). But, in EIKAL, Dolly doesn’t just deep dive into the nostalgia of girlhood and wax poetic on the foundation female friendship has given her to go on and conquer the world. She also discloses a lot of detail about her personal life. Prior to the publication of the memoir, she was the dating columnist for the UK Times, which means, even before she rose to literary superstardom, it wasn’t exactly difficult to track every move she made in her personal life.
She mentioned in quite a few interviews after the book was published and had enjoyed many moons on the UK bestseller lists that she’d had a few too many parasocial encounters, and was inclined to stop sharing so much of her own life with the world. She pivoted from journalism to fiction (though she maintains an agony aunt column in The Times), and published a book called Ghosts in 2020. While the side plots may not have had any bearing on Alderton’s own life, the protagonist, a food writer named Nina navigating dating apps in North London, seemed only to differ from Dolly in the sense that she was a food writer and not, well, a regular writer.
With her third book, Good Material, she’s made her most valiant effort yet to avoid autobiographical associations: narrated the book from a male perspective. Yes, the millennial generation’s leading girl’s girl has written a book from the perspective of sad, balding man named Andy. How the mighty fall? Not exactly. It is, surprisingly, quite good.
My friend Sam picked it up for me on a trip to London before it was released here in the US (thanks luv xx), and I flew through it in a matter of two days, knowing all of the other Dolly fans I’m friends with (of which there are many, which is why it’s always surprised me when I’ve heard her say she hasn’t taken off in America*) would want to get their hands on it after me.
Good Materials begins with a list: all of the reasons it’s good Andy and Jen are no longer together. It’s clear Andy has been dumped, by Jen, who he met through his best friend, who is married to her best friend (making the breakup all the more difficult). The book is a forensic exploration of a man’s life post-breakup (Alderton interviewed 15 different men on their experiences to ensure she was writing truthfully)…a particularly pathetic man, at that. Andy goes through all of the typical stages of a man in his thirties struggling to uncover his own identity after the death of a long-term relationship. Is he fun and adventurous, the type of guy who can live comfortably on a houseboat? (No). Is he a guy’s guy, ready, willing and able to crush endless nights out with the boys, never worrying about when to settle down? (I’ll let you guess). And more importantly, what about him made him unlovable to Jen?
It’s funny and moving; bittersweet but real, and the final chapters are a satisfying perspective shift that leaves the reader with a clear, holistic view of what happened. It’s the ideal book for gifting to a friend after a breakup - and I wouldn’t even fault a man for reading it at the 72nd St. Stop.
*To be fair, she said this in an interview, or maybe even The High Low, YEARS ago, and given it’s the “Read with Jenna”/Today Show book of the month AND the Barnes & Noble bookstore pick AND her NYC talk sold out in hours (I got tickets, xoxo), I think she’s doing just fine now.