Just not for me
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The blurb
When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming a grown up, journalist and former Sunday Times dating columnist Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all. In her memoir, she vividly recounts falling in love, wrestling with self-sabotage, finding a job, throwing a socially disastrous Rod-Stewart themed house party, getting drunk, getting dumped, realising that Ivan from the corner shop is the only man you've ever been able to rely on, and finding that that your mates are always there at the end of every messy night out. It's a book about bad dates, good friends and - above all else - about recognising that you and you alone are enough.
Glittering with wit and insight, heart and humour, Dolly Alderton's powerful début weaves together personal stories, satirical observations, a series of lists, recipes, and other vignettes that will strike a chord of recognition with women of every age - while making you laugh until you fall over. Everything I know About Love is about the struggles of early adulthood in all its grubby, hopeful uncertainty.
The Review
I'm a bit bamboozled after reading this. I thought I was going to love it. I know of Dolly Alderton already, having been introduced to her podcast The High Low, which she co-hosts with Pandora Sykes, and so I knew that this book was coming from quite a privileged, middle class author. However, she is also someone whose views and opinions I like and respect. If you listen to the podcast, you can tell that she is a kind and intelligent person and she has an outlook on the world that I really admire.
However... I did not enjoy this memoir. And I feel that I should; I grew up during the same era as Alderton, so a lot of her cultural references about being a teenager in the 2000's were nostalgic for me. However...I couldn't help but feel it came across as really entitled. Which is a shame, because as I've already said, I don't actually think she is like that at all.
The majority of this memoir focusses on the debauchery of Alderton's 20s. And there is a lot of debauchery. She very casually references all of her binge drinking and drug taking years, with almost an'Oh, wasn't I just scandalous?' vibe. She does recognise that her drinking got out of hand and it was something she had to wrestle with - but there was very little of the book devoted to this and much more devoted to her stories of endless drunken shenanigans. After a while, all these stories seemed to merge into one and it was really hard to warm to the self-absorbed character she paints herself as.
I do get that this is partly the point. She is open about a portion of her formative years where she was narcissistic and much of this book is about what she's learnt from her experiences. Nevertheless, it was just too indulgent for me, too flippant about the frivolity of her life and the opportunities that just seemed to be handed to her on a platter. I couldn't identify with most of it.
Two things in this story did resonate with me. One was her focus on the importance of the friendships in her life, mainly her female friendships. She really gets across the importance these relationships have played in her life and how important it is to cherish them. The other is that age-old adage of 'youth being wasted on the young.' We all felt at some point in our lives that we would be young forever and she sums up that feeling perfectly:
"It is the sense of being a time millionaire - having oodles and oddles of options. I will forever mourn the teenage and twenty-something feeling of being a proprietor of endless empty minutes, of having boundless days ahead of me. I think whatever age I am, I'll always be searching for stacks more of it"
So yes, this book hugely disappointed me. Many people really love it so perhaps there is some hidden irony that I am just not getting. The final straw for me was that she kept regaling me with these insightful realisations of things she has learnt - that just were not that much of a revelation:
"However thin or fat you are is no indicator of the love you deserve or will receive"
Yes. No S***.
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