Nearly everything I know about love, I’ve learned in my long-term friendships with women. Particularly the ones I’ve lived with at one point or another. I know what it is to know every tiny detail about a person and revel in that knowledge as if it were an academic subject.
At the time that Dolly Alderton wrote Everything I Know About Love (2018), she had just wrapped up a four year stint as a “dating columnist” for The Sunday Times, so I suppose I can understand how she was given a chance to publish a memoir, at thirty, that primarily focuses on her dating life up to that point. The downside to the concept is that by the time she turned thirty, Alderton hadn’t had what she would actually consider a long-term, serious relationship — so any wisdom she has to share on the topic is a bit thin — but the upside is that the misadventures of her love life (and her life in general) make for an interesting story, and her wry and candid voice is consistently engaging. I don’t know if this book needs to exist, but it captures something true about the Millennial experience (at least that of a boarding-school-raised white British woman who had a dream job fall into her lap and, despite claiming poverty as she shared a damp and crumbling flat with her girlfriends, suffered no serious consequences of her blackout drinking binges or risky hookups) and I don’t regret spending this time in Alderton’s company. This would be a 3.5 star read, rounded down.
Some of the memories I have are joyful, some of them are sad, and that was the reality. Sometimes I danced with a grin on my face until dawn in a circle of my closest friends, sometimes I fell over in the street running for the night bus in the rain and lay on the wet pavement for far longer than I should have. Sometimes I knocked myself out walking into a lamppost, left with a purple chin for days. But sometimes I woke up in a loving tangle of hungover girls, filled with nothing but comfort and joy.
From the first time getting drunk at a bat mitzvah at twelve, Alderton long sought out opportunities to drink heavily, and this book is stuffed with stories of her (often risk-filled) attempts to keep the parties going long after she had drunk her friends under the table. Being the loud drunk girl can-canning on the dance floor at the pub, scanning the room for a guy to hook up with, seems to be Alderton’s primary activity through her twenties; and as her friends entered serious relationships one by one, and as her own romances crashed and burned, Alderton found her sense of self cracking up. Therapy helped and becoming a more present friend to her roommates helped and realising that “everything she knew about love” was tied to her longtime friendships with these women — that helped, too. By thirty, having tried every dating app and trick for the sake of her newspaper column, Alderton came to the conclusion that maybe she didn’t even need a man in her life:
I am enough. My heart is enough. The stories and the sentences twisting around my mind are enough. I am fizzing and frothing and buzzing and exploding. I’m bubbling over and burning up. My early-morning walks and my late-night baths are enough. My loud laugh at the pub is enough. My piercing whistle, my singing in the shower, my double-jointed toes are enough. I am a just-pulled pint with a good, frothy head on it. I am my own universe; a galaxy; a solar system. I am the warm-up act, the main event, and the backing singers. And if this is it, if this is all there is — just me and the trees and the sky and the seas — I know now that that’s enough.
The stories are engaging — many are funny, some heart-wrenching — and Alderton does a good job of forming them into a meaningful narrative, but there’s some filler here, too: unnecessary recipes and satirical invented emails from bridezillas and a mom-to-be-zilla (is that a thing?) that I didn’t really find amusing. As her life story rolls out chronologically, Alderton lists everything she knows about love at twenty-one, and then twenty-five, and then thirty — and while this affords her an opportunity to give her evolving opinion on important matters such as waxing body hair and faking orgasms, I was still left thinking, “She’s thirty: this may be the accumulated wisdom of her years, but it’s not that many years, really.” Overall: I did like Alderton’s voice and writing style and the obvious love she shows for her girlfriends; this was entertaining for the most part, ultimately comes to a point about found family in these times of disconnection, and was an easy page turner; I was never bored. That makes it a worthwhile read to me (but maybe doesn’t need to exist).
