A modern day Nora Ephron, from novels to memoirs, television, podcasting and journalism - Dolly Alderton can do it all!
Dolly Alderton is a British journalist, writer and podcaster. She had a dating column in the Sunday Times and has written for publications including the Daily Telegraph, GQ, Marie Claire, Man Repeller, and Vice.
I first came across Dolly in 2017 when I started listening to The High Low, a pop culture and current affairs podcast hosted by Dolly Alderton and Pandora Sykes who is also a journalist. The High Low, which ended after 4 years in 2020, was for me the podcast which got me into listening to podcasts. Now as an avid "podcat" even though I have a full roster of podcasts that I listen to weekly, I still find myself returning to old episodes of The High Low for a quick pick me up. After listening to it for years (and I'm not going to lie, definitely forming a little bit of a para-social friendship with Dolly and Pandora) returning to it brings makes me feel like I'm having a lovely natter with my pals and I still find myself picking up great book or film recommendation that I missed out on upon first listen.
Dolly is also the author of the memoir Everything I Know About Love (2018) and the fiction novel Ghosts (2020). If I could recommend one book to every twenty-something woman I know it would be Everything I Know I Love!
It is the perfect book for recent graduates or for anyone who feels like their life is moving slower than that of their friends. It grapples the the humiliation of modern day dating culture, celebrates the power of platonic love and
female friendships and is a fantastic guide to modern life and makes me feel better about not having everything figured out. It celebrates the fun in sort-of wandering aimlessly through your twenties and makes me excited to see what is coming next! At only 33, I can only hope that by the time it comes around, Dolly will have written another memoir to guide me through my thirties!
In 2020, Dolly also turned her hand to fiction writing. With years of experience in television writing, it is no surprise that Ghosts (pictured at the top of this blog post), her first foray into this type of novel writing, was also a huge success. Ghosts follows Nina Dean, a 32 year-old food writer and details her meeting with Max, a beguiling romantic hero, and the subsequent fall out of this romance and the impact is has on Nina, her friends and family. Ghosts deals with many of the same themes as Dolly's memoir - how women deal with the process of ageing, female friendships and complicated family dynamics. It is funny and tender and filled with hugely clever observations about modern life.
I think we will be seeing more and more of Dolly in the years to come, and with the fast and far-reaching success of both her novels, I don't see her fading into the background anytime soon. You can currently find Dolly writing for The Sunday Times and we will soon have a TV adaptation of Everything I Know About Love hitting our screens sometime this year! The show will be a semi-fictionalised retelling of the bestselling memoir and will star Bel Powley (The Morning Show) and Emma Appleton (Traitors) among other young stars and will be set in 2012.
Stay tuned to The History Book blog for other author recommendations and Dolly if you ever happen to see this - thank you for guiding me through my young adulthood so far!
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