She’s become the nation’s most trusted voice on relationships, but the writer tackles a new perspective with her latest book that will surprise and delight
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 charttopping 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 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 thirties 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 cohosted 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 in Gloucestershire. ‘I’mapersonofextremes,’ 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 likely make you both laugh and cry as it takes on the demise of a rela
