The key ideas

Everything I Know About Love

Dolly Alderton, 2018

In her twenties, British journalist Dolly Alderton looked for love in men, in bars and in other people's approval. Her funny, candid memoir tells how she kept running away from herself and why she learned almost everything about love from her friends. It is a book about telling intensity apart from intimacy and learning to be your own support.

Who it is for

For anyone in their twenties who is looking for love and can't understand why they keep making the same mistakes. And for everyone whose best friend once disappeared headfirst into a new relationship.

Nearly everything I know about love, I've learnt in my long-term friendships with women.

When I finally have a boyfriend

Dolly Alderton's book opens with a list of what she knew about love as a teenager: romantic love matters more than anything in the world; whoever hasn't found it by adulthood has lost. And the last item: “When I finally have a boyfriend, little else will matter.”

The British journalist's memoir follows her up to the age of twenty-eight: bars, dates, text conversations and other people's flats at three in the morning. Between the chapters she slips in recipes, lists and joke letters, but the book rests on a few turning points in her life.

She finds her answer nowhere near where she was looking. Almost everything she knows about love she learned not from men but from long friendships with women. But first she had to stop running away from herself.

A taxi three counties away for a good story

One night, twenty-one-year-old Dolly drank so much that on a London bus to Oxford Circus she became convinced she was going to the city of Oxford. Toward morning she took a taxi to Leamington Spa, three counties away, to a friend's party, and emptied her bank account. Watching the dawn over the motorway, she thought only one thing: this will make a great story.

As a teenager she saw drinking as a way to seem grown up, so that people would finally take her seriously. Later another reason came along: sober Dolly worried about what others thought, while drunk Dolly did cartwheels on the dance floor.

She had a similar story with food. When her first boyfriend dumped her, she nearly stopped eating, and every compliment, she writes, fed her instead of lunch. Leo's love, books and a doctor helped her get out of it.

Over the years Alderton noticed that drinking can also take experience away: important conversations are forgotten by morning, work falls apart, and afterward you feel ashamed in front of people. Her conclusion is that constant shame keeps you from taking yourself seriously. Trying to become an adult through alcohol, she ended up feeling like a child.

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About the author

Dolly Alderton is a British journalist and writer who wrote a dating column for The Sunday Times. Her first book, Everything I Know About Love, was later made into a BBC series.

All books by this author: Dolly Alderton

Terms from the book

  • Leo
  • Scott
  • David
  • Guru
  • Intensity
  • Leukemia
  • Oxford Circus: A square at the crossing of two main shopping streets in central London. Its only link to the city of Oxford is the name of the street.
  • Leamington Spa: A small spa town in Warwickshire, in the middle of England, near the University of Warwick.
  • Farly: Farly Kleiner, the author's best friend since school. Alderton dedicates the last lines of her acknowledgements to her.
  • Tottenham Court Road: A busy shopping street in central London. In the book its name became a sign of dull, everyday adult life.
  • Eleanor: The psychotherapist Alderton worked with for more than a year. The book gives only her first name.
  • Florence: Florence Kleiner, Farly's younger sister. Alderton dedicated the book to her.
  • Sardinia: A large Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea.
  • Orkney Islands: An archipelago off the north coast of Scotland.

All terms

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