Everything I Know About Love

Dolly Alderton is a journalist, podcaster, and author from the United Kingdom. Her column in the UK paper The Sunday Times is called “Dear Dolly.” In each column, Alderton takes the role of the “agony aunt,” a female staff member to whom the paper’s readers address anonymous letters asking for help with the various issues in their professional, domestic, romantic, and familial lives. Everything I Know About Love (2018) is Alderton’s first book, followed by the novel Ghosts (2020) and a collection of her Sunday Times columns entitled Dear Dolly (2022). Broadly, Alderton’s work focuses on female friendship and life as a millennial woman. In Everything I Know About Love, Alderton explores the significance of long-term female friendships in her life, and the memoir ultimately posits the love found in her close female friendships as being just as (if not more) fulfilling than the love she experiences in her romantic relationships with men.

As Alderton ages, she comes to understand that her view of love and femininity has been profoundly shaped by the media she consumed and her upbringing in traditional all-girls schools. Recovering from the destructive habits she cultivated in pursuing her ideal of femininity sees Alderton confront her perceptions of her physical body and learn to define femininity and womanhood on her own terms. As Alderton enters her mid- and late-twenties, she experiences a number of intense relationships with men, which she later understands in therapy as being the product of her people-pleasing tendencies, and her desire to keep people at a certain distance through the illusion of openness and vulnerability. Alderton’s work resonates with readers because it speaks to the beliefs and fears of women of her generation and looks unflinchingly at the culture of internet dating and social media that can warp women’s sense of self-worth. In sharing her story, Alderton opens the conversation for larger discussions of friendship, intimacy, and self-esteem.