“Andy!” he shouts from the window as he rolls it down. “Remember: a broken heart is a jester’s greatest prop.” I smile defeatedly. “You’ve been handed a clown wig and collar. You could get some of your best work out of this.”
I was pleasantly surprised by Good Material, having not read Dolly Alderton before. Funny and poignant, this story of a break-up and its aftermath went down smooth — and just when I was beginning to wonder if it was fair for a female author to be giving us this intimately emotional story from a man’s POV, Alderton pulls off a subtle trick (I was so pleasantly surprised that I’ll give no spoilers) and ultimately, this is a wondrously relatable, feminist perspective on modern life and relationships. The ending bit is the best bit, but I was happily entertained right up to the wow moment. I’ll definitely read Alderton again. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Comedians make the best drinking companions. They will never have enough validation, enough success, enough love, enough good stories, enough material. They will always be looking for something else. A good time needs the fires of tragedy underneath it to keep it on a rolling boil.
Andy Dawson is a thirty-five year old London-based comedian (of middling success) who finds himself homeless and emotionally adrift when his girlfriend of four years, Jen, decides to break up with him; seemingly out of nowhere. Andy soon discovers that a break-up at thirty-five is different from a break-up in your twenties: his friends are all married now and having kids and generally unavailable to join him for drinks at short notice. Alderton contrasts the lacking emotional support Andy receives from his friends with what he hears Jen is getting from hers (complicated by the fact that they met through their best friends and had been a best-friend-foursome for the past four years) and it is touching to watch as Andy deals with just how much he has lost. I appreciated that Jen was never made out to be a villain, and as we get to know her, little-by-little, we realise there’s always two sides to every break-up. Along the way, Andy has a string of funny misadventures — from discovering that he’s losing his hair to renting a room from a doomsday-prepping old man (as the calendar flips over to the year 2020) — and as a comedian, at least it’s all “good material” for his next Fringe show:
Throughout the hour, he reads passages from a book his mum gave him about the science of heartbreak and relates it back to examples of how he processed the break-up. The last section he reads is about how elephants grieve. “If this were a previous show of mine, it’s at this point I would say that elephants and I have more in common than just a large trunk, but I won’t,” he says as he gets a laugh. “I won’t say that. Because I’m trying something different, ladies and gentlemen.” He puts the book down. “I think, if I try to make sense of the madness of the last six months, I could say that I’ve been doing what the elephants do. I’ve been scattering the bones of us and who we were together. Reading all our old messages, throwing bottles of discounted Armani She into a canal, trying to recreate our memories, standing on stage and talking to you. It’s a weird kind of mourning and a weird kind of celebration, to examine the skeleton of something that was once so magnificent, before you scatter all the fragments of it out into the world to say goodbye.”
There are a few things I would like to write about this book’s ending — but won’t, to prevent spoilers — yet I will note that in her afterword, Alderton thanks the dozen or so men who vetted the voice and friendships of her male narrator, and ultimately, that felt like a fair use of the male perspective to illuminate the female experience; and that’s what elevated this (admittedly entertaining throughout) book from good to great.
