Dolly Alderton would never cheat on anyone, at least not professionally. ‘I like being creatively monogamous,’ she says. By which she means she can only ever focus on one project at a time. As a result, her work life, which has spanned writing books and TV scripts, hosting a chart-topping podcast and penning her famous Sunday Times agony aunt column, comprises of intense bursts of activity. ‘I’m left alone and I get to have a relationship with this thing. Art imitating life, I like going deep in the deep end with someone or something…I become drunk in love [when writing].’
It's her shrewd and witty take on love and relationships, both romantic and platonic, that 35-year-old Alderton has become so well-known for. Her 2018 memoir Everything I Know About Love, a rollicking and at times heart-breaking odyssey through past relationships, has sold over three quarters of a million copies and was turned into a much-anticipated BBC drama. Her first novel Ghosts published in 2020, about a woman in her early 30s whose life seemingly unravels as she meets the man she hopes to marry, also became a Sunday Times bestseller.
Over the past five years, Alderton, who co-hosted the hit millennial podcast The High Low for four years alongside Pandora Sykes, has touched the hearts and minds of millions of women: the hashtag #dollyalderton has been viewed more than 33 million times on TikTok despite the writer not being on the platform. As Lena Dunham put it, Alderton has become ‘quite simply, the bard of modern day love’.
And now she’s back with another novel, this time marking a departure from what’s come before. True to form however, Alderton wrote Good Material in an intense sitting of six months, squirrelled away at her parents’ house outside Gloucestershire. ‘I’m a person of extremes,’ she admits. ‘I don't really know what writing is if you're not looking like a yeti having three hours sleep, vaping and drinking tea with whiskey by the end of it’. The result is a pacey, funny and astute read that looks at heartbreak from the male perspective.
It bounds along with all of Alderton’s most loveable elements dotted throughout, including her expert grasp of dialogue, helped by her time working in TV and script development. It will most likely make you both laugh and cry as it takes on the demise of a relationship between city worker Jen and her struggling comedian boyfriend Andy, whose inner thoughts anchor the narrative.
The idea to write from a male perspective came to Alderton during a lockdown summer, after she’d been left bitterly heartbroken in the midst of the pandemic. She went for dinner with a friend who was in a similar situation; both had been instructed by their therapists to write a list of everything that had annoyed them about their ex. They ended up reading each other their lists. ‘I remember walking home from Soho to Camden and bouncing the whole way. I couldn’t stop thinking, what would happen if you opened a novel with that list? How much backstory would that give you?’
But Alderton was determined not to centre her narrative around ‘another heartbroken woman’: ‘I feel like everything that I've built in my career so far has been about female pain and female heartbreak. I just couldn't sit and write about another woman who had been let down by a man…it was too depressing.’ And so, she set about thinking of other ways to approach the topic, including doing a period piece and dissecting heartbreak in a totally different era.
Then the penny dropped, ‘Suddenly, I was like, what's one of my favourite books? ‘High Fidelity’. What is the great question of my life that I have not solved? And it's men, and how they work. I don't understand how their hearts work. I don’t understand how their friendships work. I don't understand their inner sexuality, I don't get any of it. So here was an opportunity to set myself my own private investigation.’
Has writing this book changed the way she approaches her own love life? ‘I think there was definitely a bit of a hole in my empathy for a while [when it comes to men and their feelings], and I’ll be working on that for the rest of my life. But I think this has gone some small way to re-address that for me personally.’ And what happens on dates when men bring up her work?
‘Unfortunately, that's not really the common experience…if they do want to comment on my job, it's more commenting on me as a public person. That side of things is harder to deal with when you're dating but the work side of things…there is nothing I find hotter than a man I'm dating sending me a picture of him reading one of my books in bed,’ she laughs. ‘Literally that is my own personal pornography forever!’
'Good Material' by Dolly Alderton is out now and £12.99 at Amazon.co.uk
