The Millennial Magic of Dolly Alderton
Dolly Alderton is the internet’s cool aunt - at the Sunday Times literally, where she is the paper’s resident ‘agony aunt’, answering readers’ queries on love, friendship, families and everything in between. On social media she is heralded as the author you just have to read as a young woman navigating your twenties, initially thanks to the publication of her memoir, Everything I Know About Love, which follows a younger Alderton doing just that. London is my personal favourite backdrop for any story and Everything I Know About Love is no exception, weaving through Camden and Tottenham Court Road; there’s something particularly satisfying about being able to picture exactly where a scene is unfolding. Part of Alderton’s charm is in her ability to illustrate personal experiences whilst neither asking for your unwavering pity or dressing it up as a punchline - her wit lies somewhere between the two, with unflinching observations of the human condition, insight enough that you can empathise but still greet her and her characters as complicated people, instead of embodiments of bullet pointed lists telling us why they behave a certain way.
Love is at the heart of everything Dolly writes - it is the undercurrent of Everything I Know About Love which, although the title may make you presume, takes you down avenues of endearment less capitalised. In a world that so often reverences romantic love as something synonymous with religious, the dissection and veneration of platonic love is something so refreshing and so needed, especially as a young woman in your twenties, which I think is one of the main reasons Alderton has been so successful with this particular demographic. We spend a lot of our adult life chasing the highs that the dating world offers, which is understandable for a generation weaned on male validation. What Alderton gets so right here is never once ridiculing dimly lit bars and phone number’s scrawled on napkins - instead she joins us in the romanticisation of dating, the disarming and the oxytocin. Falling in love is wonderful and often deserving of the albums and movies dedicated to just that. But she also asks us to look around at the abundance of love that already exists in our lives, the kinds that so often get deemed second-best in the light of a handsome stranger in a West Hampstead pub. Through Dolly’s narrative, it is clear that the great loves of our lives are so often friends and family, an inference that is all too glaringly obvious. The particular magic of Dolly Alderton’s writing lies in her homage to female friendship - a category that has long been deemed the least romantic of all. The words bitchy and malicious spring to mind - the female friend group has long been victim of the patriarchal ideological competition, with many a sixth form day spent silently competing on common room sofas. The evident conclusion is the inauthenticity of these relationships and the pure magic of those friendships stripped of such barbed commentaries, which is at the heart of every story Alderton tells, whether recounting her own experiences or weaving the tales of thirty year old dumpees.
It is Alderton’s ability to empathise but self-efface that make her voice so resounding in the literary world, her wit accompanied by her heart. Everything she publishes has the ability to console you but also ask questions of you, a balance that is often so difficult to strike. Dolly Alderton, you are always one of my dream dinner guests.