Dolly Alderton is the Adele of writing. Like the singer with her albums 19, 21, 25, 30, Dolly produces with a regularity that, frankly, skewers the hearts of less successful writers, an extremely popular, poignant treatise on the age she finds herself.
Everything I Know About Love was a knockabout, early-twenties, chaotic voyage of self-discovery, Ghosts was an early thirties paen to feeling tremendously younger than you are, but at the same time also about a hundred years old and massively fed up with men your own age.
In Good Material Alderton stands in the shallow waters of 35 and, doom doom, looming middle age.
Our hero is Andy. He is a 35 year-old, unsuccessful comedian and his girlfriend, Jen, has dumped him. Good Material is the meticulous unpicking of everything that happens in the wake of a dumping, with the added high-stakes drama of being 35: your friends aren’t excited that you are single again; you are exhausted by the dating scene and want to eat crisps in front of the telly with the same woman every night; the available women are 23 and unfathomable, from another planet.
We get this break-up process from a female perspective often, but the vanishing numbers of young men writing any fiction at the moment - let alone about break-ups - means we don’t hear from them about this. I think Dolly has done them a solid favour with this book.
I liked EIKAL and I liked Ghosts but I loved Good Material, possibly because as Dolly gets older she wanders further into my world of children and husbands and baffling young people and thus becomes more relevant to me. Good Material is also very funny, with bonkers side-characters - flatmates, personal trainers and colleagues - which remind me a bit of the delightfully unhinged truth-tellers you find in Anne Tyler books.
You can pre-order Good Material here and you won’t regret it. It is out on 9th November.
I write all this, obviously, with impending heartburn from the personal nightmare of Dolly’s relentless success even though I know Dolly and she is charming. I refuse to believe that the two are mutually exclusive.
Ahh I loved this little review. I went to see Dolly last night at the Lowry in Manchester and it was EPIC. Listening to her talking death of the iTunes voucher and Burger King Doritos with Ivo Graham just made me love her, and her writing, even more. She's so relatable. Very excited to sit down with my copy of Good Material when it arrives tomorrow!
I knew Dolly when she was five… her mum was my first ever boss & was tall, glamorous, wise & warm. Imagine how I feel when I see her success - what the fuck have I done with my life.
Other child prodigies I used to babysit in Paris are now a Chanel model & author & actress / sculptress / muse… yup.
I am currently lying fully clothed in my bed, with my two hairy hounds debating washing my hair which I have been putting rosemary oil in & now have dreadlocks…