Everything I Know About Love

Biography and memoir

Print length: 368 pagesHarperCollins Publishers, 2021

Description

Dolly Alderton looks back from her school years through the upheavals of her late twenties, tracing how her ideas about love change as adulthood becomes less hypothetical. Bad dates, intense friendships, parties, education, body-image struggles, career shifts, and grief provide the lived material, but romantic experience is only one strand of the memoir. Enduring friendship and slowly earned self-worth emerge as forms of love with their own demands and consolations. Alderton breaks the chronology with reproduced text conversations, recipes, lists, comic observations, and brief vignettes, giving the book the texture of memories exchanged among friends. Candid and self-questioning, it examines the distance between youthful fantasies of adulthood and the untidy life that actually arrives.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Conversational · Direct · Fragmentary · Witty

Pace

Brisk

Tone

Humorous · Intimate · Reflective · Wistful

Structure

Nonlinear · Vignettes

Focus

Character · Relationships · Voice

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 2 / 5
Ideas: 2 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

BelongingComing of ageFriendshipGriefIdentityLove

About Dolly Alderton

Dolly Alderton is a British author, journalist, podcaster and screenwriter whose work examines adult relationships with candor, humor and close attention to social behavior. Her early journalism included a stint as a dating columnist for The Sunday Times, and love, friendship and the pressures of millennial womanhood remain central to her writing. The memoir Everything I Know About Love draws on bad dates, parties, grief, body-image struggles and career changes, but gives female friendship as much weight as romance. Across memoir, fiction and advice, Alderton favors a conversational, direct style that turns embarrassment and private uncertainty into material for reflection. Dear Dolly extends that approach to readers’ questions about breakups, loneliness, sex, family and damaging friendships, combining personal experience with practical counsel. In the novel Good Material, she shifts perspective to a male comedian after a breakup, using comedy and self-deception to study how people narrate romantic failure. Her wider career in podcasts and screenwriting reflects the same interest in intimate lives and the stories people make from them.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Language: English
ISBN: 9780062968791

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