Dolly AldertonReviews

I don't understand why this book is considered to be laugh out loud funny. I found it to be profoundly sad. It is a story of Jen and Andy, who have broken up after a 4 year relationship. They love each other, but Jen doesn't feel that their relationship has what she needs. Andy can't seem to let her go. He drinks too much, has questionable dates, stalks Jen online, and bemoans to his friends that he doesn't understand why she left. He is a comedian, but he flounders at it. Jen has a high powered job and she excels at it. All their friends are having children, but she doesn't know if she wants a family.
The story follows their feelings over the course of several months.
I just felt sad the entire book - sad due to the end of a relationship.

fiction - a (not very successful) stand up comedian Andy in 2019 London, England, UK copes with the sudden end of his 4-year relationship with Jen, who won't explain why she broke up with him.

Andy's not all that likeable (or funny), but he's not terrible either--mostly he mopes/whines about the breakup, and he is only tolerable because he knows he's wearing on his friends. Despite Andy's shortcomings, his story is mildly interesting, and as the months pass from summer 2019 to fall/autumn 2019, Andy's paranoid landlord/housemate Morris points out that something big is about to happen to the world; the pre-COVID timeline adds an extra layer of urgency. I liked the ending, but it was maybe a lot to drudge through to get there.

the twist at the end is that we finally hear Jen's side of the story, and she just does not feel the need to be someone's girlfriend, wife, or mother. With her home mortgage covered by tenant renters and having amassed significant savings, she decides to quit her high-paying job that she really doesn't like in early 2020 and plans to spend a year traveling the world in late March 2020 (!) as a 35 y.o. woman without the obligations to family/kids that her friends now all share.

I received a copy of this book for free from the publisher (Harper Perennial) for promotional purposes.

I previously read Dolly’s memoir, “Everything I Know About Love,” and loved it, so naturally I also enjoyed this one.

This book is a collection of selected responses from her Dear Dolly column. I’ve never read her column, so all of these were new to me. The responses are divided into 7 sections: Dating, Friendship, Relationships, Family, Sex, Break-ups & Exes, and Body & Soul. I liked that they were organized in this way; it gave the book structure.

Like her memoir, Dolly’s responses to her readers are very conversational. Reading them feels like talking to an old friend. Her advice is very practical and real, but she’s never judgmental. She seems to really understand what her readers are asking and gives relatable advice. She also knows how to incorporate pop culture references (like when she mentions listening to a Lana Del Rey album) without seeming like she’s trying too hard.

This is a great book to pick up if you’re looking for some life advice, especially when it comes to dating or love. As someone still looking for love, I found quite a bit of her advice helpful.

Overall, if you’re a fan of Dolly’s work, you should definitely give this book a read!

A story about a breakup mainly from the man’s perspective with some about the woman. The people around them were a bit more interesting. Set in England so the book was slightly more interesting. The stuff about comedians was fun

This really has nothing to do with Ghosts, but rather being Ghosted by a boyfriend

A book club book, I forgot to record. Had its moments, but they were few and far between slogging through Andy, who for a comedian, didn't bring many laughs. Most of the other characters were more endearing. (I really liked his mom's view on the world.)

There are chunks of material in Alderton's writings and thoughts that I definitely agree with, and found refreshing to have explicitly spelled out and explored; primarily, her viewpoints on how valuable her friendships with other girls are. The keystone quote that really sums this up is "Nearly everything I know about love, I've learned in my long-term friendships with women." I love that Alderton emphasizes that over and over again. She also isn't afraid to poke and explore at various ideas like how much people in a new romantic relationship with someone shove their friendships to the side, or just how presumptuous baby showers can be (the line of people "demand[ing] money and time from people to celebrate [their] own personal life choices" is so accurate). It's so very clear Alderton cares deeply for her loving friendships and wants to encourage readers to do the same! I think that if readers come away with anything from this book, it will be to tend to and value your friendships, because those are the people who you can build a real, true community and family with.

On the other hand, this book just DRIPS with privilege and heteronormativity. Alderton is a 30-something woman who is largely reflecting on her teens and 20s, which were filled with drinking, partying, careless spending, European holidays, working jobs that allow an unusual level of creative freedom, etc. and this results in a book that is, on manyyy levels, just not relatable whatsoever. At times she genuinely sounds like a caricature of a British party woman that might pop up on an SNL skit or an episode of "Skins". She describes so many drunken nights that they begin to blur together, and each consecutive one offers less than the one before, which made me want to start skipping chapters.
This book was also just extremely hetero. Even when Alderton is emphasizing female friendship and not changing yourself for any man, there is a steady and constant undercurrent that runs through the entire work that still places romance with a man as highly desirable and finding a partner, even if it happens later in life, still needs to happen at some point. It just seems so antithetical to everything she comes to conclusions about time and time again, and by the end of the book the conclusion sort of peters out to this weird agreement of "Yes, love yourself and cherish your female friendships because they're the most precious love you will have, oh and also you will get a boyfriend one day who will love you even if you're silly and don't shave and have a wild past!"

All in all, there are some really heartfelt and valuable writing in "Everything I Know About Love", but it's a little like mining: you're gonna have to dig and pick through some rubble to get to the shiny bits (I actually don't know how mining works, so just picture the mining scene in "Snow White"). I'm curious to maybe read Alderton's latest work and see how her writing and voice have developed since this book came out.

At first, I thought I was listening to a Bridget Jones-esque romantic comedy about a woman in her early 30s looking for love. And that would have been fine, because I like those kinds of books just fine. But this turned into a much more thoughtful, bittersweet story of a woman looking to hold on to connections - with her father who is suffering from dementia, with her old friends whose lives are changing with marriage and parenthood, and with the man she met through a dating app who seemed perfect until he wasn't.

The parts of the book about Nina and her father are beautifully done and made me tear up at times, though I don't have any personal experience with losing a loved one to the cruelty of dementia. And I loved Nina's relationships with her friends, including her ex-boyfriend. The chapter where she attends his fiancee's hen do is very funny. There are a lot of funny moments and some great, humorous dialogue, but the novel is concerned with weightier issues, and Alderton handles them well. It was a truly satisfying read.

4.5 stars

NB: I think this would have been closer to a 4-star book, but the audio narration was so good, it raised it a level.½

Dolly, you are, as always, my literary hero 3 this book was SO SO sO SO SO GOOD! the way Dolly Alderton writes women's fiction without hating women is !!! and especially in this book where 99% of the book is written from the perspective of a man grieving a bad breakup. the most compelling part of this story is that Dolly manages to take the reader through the mania, the bargaining, and the desperation of searching for control in a situation that you did not choose to be in, and she does it without making us hate the woman who has caused the breakup. i think it was important to have a section from Jen’s perspective at the end of the book. it gives a lot of clarification to much of the breakup and pulls the reader from the typical pedestalization of a protagonist that inevitably occurs in fiction. Andy is not perfect. Jen is not perfect. the complexity of these characters on such a molecular level is stunning. and a huge shoutout to womanhood!! Jen’s struggle with wanting to exist outside of a relationship and the implication that all women want to have marriages and children struck such a chord to me. live laugh love Dolly Alderton

I really enjoyed this book about dating, ghosting, relationships of all kind, etc. I thought at first that this would be another “romance” type millennial book but I was very impressed with the insights the author included about life. Nina is one of the last of her friends to be married and have children. She’s not desperate but has decided to try dating apps. Things go awry and she soldiers on. The book reflects on dating relationships, friend relationships as well as parent daughter relationships. Very well done on all accounts.

Dolly Alderton writes amazing non-fiction, but I'm coming to the conclusion that her fiction isn't exactly my cup of tea. I didn't mind Ghosts and Good Material is the same kind of feeling - it's allllll rigggggggght but not incredibly engaging. The main character Andy isn't always likeable or sympathetic, which is fine, but there's not much to keep me wanting to pick up this breakup novel.

The story is of a breakup between Jen and Andy. They've been going out for years, live together but then Jen wants to call it quits. Andy really didn't see this coming (he thought that she was The One) and the story deals with their breakup in all its messiness. Andy is a standup comedian (and not a particularly successful one) but at the heart of it, he's just a lost boy making questionable choices. He's a sad character and while it's easy to empathise with him at first, it does wear off. There are only so many painstakingly written texts to Jen with just the right amount of casualness the reader can read through or awkward moments that turn to arguments.

Much of the story is Andy slowly coming to terms with his new single status when all his friends are part of a couple or have kids. It's not always the happiest book, although there are some light moments, some awkwardly amusing parts at Andy's expense and a mention of Mr Brightside's lyrics. The strongest part for me was towards the end of the novel where the reader gains an insight into Jen's version of the breakup. While it confirms some things that the reader had expected all along, it's also a good insight into how the past shapes us and that an individual's reasons for doing something aren't always clear to outsiders.

Alderton writes really well as always. She's on topic as always and the choice to write from the first person male pays off. While Andy is ultimately not the character you'd want next to you during a long journey, other characters are well crafted, interesting and refreshing such as Andy's best friend and his wife. The plot moves along at a decent pace and the insight from Jen is worth finishing the book for. It just didn't interest me all that much, perhaps because of Andy's insight about so many things. If more of the story had been written from Jen's perspective, it would have been much more fascinating for me - an insightful, modern look at relationships.

http://samstillreading.wordpress.com

as a lesbian, reading this book on dolly’s perception of love opened my eyes to understanding how heteronormative love is like, at least to her. i feel so excited to grow and change, and learn. so excited to deepen my friendships, and find those people that make me the happiest. i wonder if it will be the same or drastically different. i’ll find out eventually.

favourite quotes:

“You know, the life isn’t happening elsewhere, it doesn’t exist in another realm. Your relationship with that man was seven years long. That was it, that’s what it was.” - 263
—
“ “You’re too hard on yourself”, she said. “You can do long-term love you’ve done it better than anyone I know.”

“How my longest relationship was two years and that was over when I was 24.”

“I’m talking about you and me, she said.” - 301
—
“I don’t need to run away from discomfort and into a male eyeliner. That’s not where I come alive. Because I am enough. My heart is enough. The stories and the sentences twisting around my mind enough.” - 305

Good Material follows Andy as he navigates through what feels like the wasteland of his life following his break-up with Jen. He really loves her and thought they were set for life so when Jen breaks it off with him he's unable to understand what's gone wrong. Over the next few months they disentangle themselves from each other in all the usual messy ways that the break-up of a long-term relationship brings.

The first thing to say about this book is that it is genuinely laugh out loud funny. I love a book that makes me guffaw and I don't come across them very often but this one is so cleverly sharp and witty that the laughs came often. It's brilliantly observed by Andy who comes across as a slightly hapless male, a part-time stand-up comedian who can't quite make a living from it and so is flitting from job to job, never quite making it to the heady heights of being a fully-fledged grown-up.

It's a bit different to see a story like this told almost entirely from the viewpoint of the male. I loved Andy and whilst I could see his flaws I also couldn't help feeling sorry for him. The ending is a nice touch and put a lot into perspective for me, as a kind of onlooker to the break-up.

I thought Good Material was superb. It's honest and real, hilarious yet also poignant, the characters are spot on creations and I didn't want the story to end. It's one of my top reads of the year.

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.

Andy obsesses about the ending of his relationship with Jen: what went wrong, how he can get her back etc etc over and over again. Then towards the end we finally hear from Jen's perspective, and this turns a few things on their heads.

On the plus side this was very funny - I laughed aloud several times. I loved Morris, Andy's eccentric landlord, and I also enjoyed Andy's encounters with the narrow boat and the storage unit clerk. On the other hand the novel was fairly one tone and I'm not sure what the point of it was. If Andy truly only worked as much as he recounted, then I'm surprised he could afford food, let alone rent.

Really enjoyed this read by Dolly Alderton. Nice insight without being too flippant or too depressing. Looking forward to exploring more of her books. Thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to read this.

I highlighted so many sections of this. Poignant and I loved the way it looked at how friendships evolve and change but ultimately come back together.

Dolly Alderton is an excellent write who knows how to discuss the nuances and big events of modern life. Her fiction is great, but her non-fiction is stellar. She gets what people are thinking and writes in a calm, nice and respectful way. This book is a collection of her newspaper columns from the UK newspaper The Sunday Times, so UK readers may have read these before. Locally, I’m without access to good weekend journalism in hard copy so I’m more than happy to read her columns in bulk.

Dolly’s columns are the modern form of ‘agony aunt’ columns which I suppose you would now call life advice columns. What I liked about her responses to each reader were that they were carefully planned, and considerate of both the reader’s feelings and the person/people they were in conflict with. It was considerate and in direct opposition to some local columns which seem to treat everything as a joke and turn into long detailed monologues about the writer’s life. While Dolly does share her own experiences, it’s relevant to the topic and not the main feature. She’s sensible without being boring and both fun and funny. The advice is practical to the reader, even when it involves facing up to big conversations.

The book is relatively slim at just over 200 pages with pretty large print, which I find is standard for collected column type books. However, the quality of writing is great. The questions are divided up into love, friendship, family, sex, relationships and what is termed ‘body and soul’ – appearance and drinking are just some of the questions covered. I did find the dating and friendship sections a little repetitive at times (possibly because I was reading in big chunks) but the great thing about this book is you can go back and forth between sections. The problems, while individual, are somewhat universal, but this is not a self-help book. It’s more like a chat and some good advice from a friend over drinks/dinner.

http://samstillreading.wordpress.com

In the beginning of this book, which was published in 2020, the narrator asks what ghosting is. She's never heard of ghosting at age 32, in 2020... because she was in a relationship for seven years... so she's totally clueless about online dating terminology despite her serial-dater best friend and the fact that she's a very ~with-it and hip~ millennial writer. The book is also filled with well-trod jokes about online dating apps, and many pre-MeToo feminist sentiments that make the novel sound like it was written in 2014 then not updated once sold to a publisher many years later. (In one example, she constantly tries to befriend a man who verbally assaults her and always acts like he's seconds away from committing battery.)

This is a romcom. Despite the cracks about heteronormativity, this is a book-long failure of the Bechdel test and is nearly fully about how to find and keep the love of your life. Even in the POV's supposed objection of heteronormative norms, it falls squarely into that camp.

If you love Bridget Jones and Fleabag, but without any of that annoying depth or character development stuff, you'll adore this fun romp about a woman who naively falls prey to toxic men, despite being so cynical and ~above~ all that love stuff. The whole book is centered around finding fairy-tale love, even if it purports to object to it.

However, there were a few briefly memorable insights within this book that largely lie outside of the book's overall message and tone that I found captivating.

This was a gift to me, otherwise I wouldn't have read it. I'm a bit surprised at the design of the book (the hardback with the floral matte cover), which tricked me into thinking this was something other than a modern-day Candace Bushnell. Read the inside jacket cover; you'll know immediately if you're going to like it or not.

2.66 stars Unremarkable. Read my full review here.½

4.5 stars - Really enjoyed this book. Felt it was well written, smart and funny with a relatable thread running throughout. As a 33 year old woman, I am the exact target audience for this book and felt it captured many of my feelings about dating and society.

Crazy, almost dangerous, concept of relationships.

This was probably not the book for me to read. I can understand that it is timely and fresh, and a perfect escape for someone at a different time of their life than me. It is a truly "modern book", and I found that I couldn't relate to it much. Dating and relationships are very far away from me. I just celebrated my 51 anniversary this year. I did think that Dolly Alderton did a good job of depicting all of her characters, showing them in all their glory, warts and all. The book also does a good job of illustrating the power of female friendships, and the ups and downs that occur in all long-standing friendships. And to keep it from getting soppy, Ms. Alderton introduces Nina's beloved father who is entering into the first stages of Alzheimers. The toll that this disease takes on families is so very difficult and that has been very-well described in this book. I would recommend this book for younger adults who are trying to make their way through life's pitfalls and highlights. Nina is a very relatable young woman and you might possibly find some helpful life choices here.

3.5

For the past few years, Nina Dean has enjoyed her single life. She's living in a beautiful flat, she's the author of a successful cooking book, with another about to release, and at work on yet another one. She has wonderful friends - including her ex - and family. But on her 32nd birthday, Nina begins to feel like maybe she's missing out on something by being single. Most of her friends are married and have children, she sees them less and less. She does want to have a family of her own and she does want to find love someday. It's just tough figuring out when someday will be. So Nina decides to give online dating a try and signs up for a new dating app called Linx. Not long into it, Nina meets Max and they hit it off. Soon they're seeing each most every day, staying over at each other's houses. Nina even begins to open up to Max about her father who is in the early stages of dementia. Max is there through it all....until he's not.

One day Max is just not there. He won't answer Nina's calls or texts. He's, essentially, become a Ghost.

This makes Nina stop and begin to really look at the other relationships in her life and where they've been where they're going.

Ghosting is a relatively new phrase for what happens when the person you're seeing just disappears and severs all contact. For some reason, I'm really drawn to the idea behind why people choose to take this course when ending a relationship. Why can there not just be some communication. So the premise for Ghosts really piqued my interest.

The bad thing about putting all that info out there already is the fact that I wasn't drawn into the Max and Nina relationship. I didn't suffer the gut-punch that Nina suffered when he disappeared because I already knew it was going to happen. So the first part of the book involves the reader sitting back and watching this unfold. The thing is, I wish the story had pulled me into these moments.

After the fact, what drove the story forward for me, was wondering if Nina would get any kind of closure. That I will not spoil for you.

In the meantime, I thought that Dolly Alderton had some really insightful views on what goes through someone's mind after they're on the receiving end of ghosting. How the doubts and questions creep up on you, how you're basically stuck with no recourse because to do that would brand you "crazy". Also some really good points about the divide between married people and single people, those with children and those without children.

As Max is not the only relationship that is floundering in Nina's life we do get some insight into the latter two categories. More and more Nina finds it tough to schedule time with her best friend Katherine whom with a toddler and another baby on the way barely has time to ask how Nina is doing on a regular basis.

Then there's her father whose memory is getting worse by the day. For me, this was the most heartbreaking relationship. The one that is slowly being erased through no fault of anyones. This is the one that is the most precious because you can kind of see time dwindling down.

While there are many poignant moments within the story, I felt like there was a slight lack of certainty that Nina has about her life. While I do understand that life is always uncertain and unpredictable when I'm reading it's my preference to have a little more of it. Maybe that's the thing I need to take away from the story, being ok with uncertainty.

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.

The humour in this novel worked for me really well, and I found the passages about Nina coming to terms with her father's dementia very moving. It was a pleasure to read about a woman who remained a good friend and daughter, and continued to do her job well and remuneratively, despite all the trials the narrator threw at her. I particularly enjoyed Lucy's hen weekend and the psychopathic downstairs neighbour.

I would recommend this novel as an interesting blend of thoughtfulness and nonsense, with a hopeful ending.

Dolly Alderton’s Ghosts is a worthy addition to fiction about women not having it all – career, love, family and friends. It’s clever and takes a more realistic look at dating and ageing family, balancing the down times with fun and frivolity. Some of it works brilliantly, some of it is a bit weird but that’s life.

Nina is doing well on the career front. She’s been able to give up teaching for her passion, food writing and buy a London flat too. She has a great, quirky friend in Lola and a friend from high school (Katherine) who she’s drifting away from. Nina is even great mates with her ex and his new partner. But her dad has dementia, her mum seems intent on living life like she’s in her twenties and she’s single. Until she joins a dating app and meets Max. It’s all going very well, very quickly. Even though her publisher hates her new book idea and her neighbour is from hell, it doesn’t matter. Not until things take an unexpected turn on several fronts as fading relationships, her dad’s illness and the cringeworthy hen’s weekend come to the fore. Will Nina still end up with it all?

Ghosts is a well-blended combination of seriousness and serious issues and outright fun. It’s got something that anyone can relate to – the best friend who now only wants to talk children and houses and is frustrated when Nina won’t/can’t do the same and the realisation that not everything will be perfect by a set date and age. There is a great analogy in the book about men being like PlayStations, with the aim to complete the level and the game and move on. It will resonate with anyone who has ticked off achievements in that exact way. The online dating, agony over texts and WhatsApp status will be familiar to many of this generation. I also enjoyed that Ghosts was about more than just Nina ticking off the relationship with Max and that Max wasn’t the sole focus of the novel. There are a couple of subplots that didn’t fit in quite as well, such as the conclusion of Nina’s argument with her neighbour. It felt forced (as did her ‘prank’ on him and his parcels) and just out of character for both Nina and the novel. I also thought the differences between Nina and her mum were wrapped up a bit too quickly and nicely.

There is a good level of detail in the characters, plot and setting of Ghosts. The way it focuses on multiple areas of Nina’s life keeps the reader interested and the contemporary themes keep it fresh.

http://samstillreading.wordpress.com