book: everything i know about love by dolly alderton
i uninstalled all social media the other day, and then had a slow day at work yesterday, and instead of scrolling through instagram reels forever, i read 2 books and started a third. who knew?
TW: BRITISH, MILLENNIAL
this book has been extremely hyped up for years, i finally bought it recently, and now i finally read it. like many memoirs, it's combination memoir and life advice. as for the memoir part, dolly is an incredible writer and i understand the hype. there is a reason i got through most of it in one sitting. i will admit, the beginning took me a little to get into, because i thought the whole book would be a drawn-out log of every romantic interest and every blackout drunk party story (can you tell i've read some musician memoirs...). but, as you keep reading, it becomes apparent that it is an important setup for her growth in the latter half of the book. you have to see and resonate with her naivety and misguided priorities and rock bottoms so you can take her growth and realizations to heart as well. which brings us to the advice part, interwoven well with the storytelling. one of the big things is, basically, the real true love is the friends we made along the way, do not prioritize random men over your strong friendships with women, do not center your life around chasing after men, and do not drop your friends just because you're in a committed relationship. MANY WOMEN NEED TO HEAR THIS. i am not one of those women, thankfully. i already knew this and my life has nothing to do with men and i have never been someone that seeks relationships for the sake of it. i think her insights on aging and the passage of time, etc, hit much harder for me, and i do hope she writes a sort of follow-up when she's actually older and not in her early 30s. also, this is a bit silly, but it was so extremely british and london-centric in ways i found a little hard to relate to, which i don't begrudge her for, but it was like london was a character in itself that i was supposed to already be familiar with and i was not. i'm sure everyone else feels the same about books in the US, though. overall, i think i was not the perfect target audience for this, because i think the target audience is an early-20s straight (and many bisexual) women that GAF too much about men, and even better if that woman is british, but it was still a valuable read for me regardless, and she is such a gifted writer and i am exciteed to check out her other work which has also come highly recommended.
March 24 2025