User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
2.5 rounded down
I'm on the fence with this one - it was light and very readable (even while discussing some heavier topics) and I enjoyed the early 00s nostalgia trip for a bit (yes, we all remember MSN messenger), but overall this felt bloated, self-indulgent and could have been 100 pages shorter. I wasn't a fan of the inclusion of the "recipes" (one was for scrambled egg?!) or fictional satirical emails either.
I’ve enjoyed Dolly’s writing in The Sunday Times magazine in the past, but this collection of “hilarious” anecdotes of her making poor choices in men and doing drugs/getting drunk while seemingly not learning much left me feeling frustrated. And the conclusion that female friendships are the important thing overall? I didn’t buy it - all of the stories shared throughout the rest of the book didn’t support this conclusion. Only Dolly’s friend Farly comes out of this book looking good!
Reading about other people being hungover and self absorbed throughout their 20s (while not doing much else) doesn't make for a fun read, at least for me, anyway. I don't know why so many people in their early 30s are writing memoirs these days - collections of anecdotes that were hilarious (for you) at the time aren’t bringing anything new or insightful to the table for the rest of us.
Rating: really liked it
3.5 stars (read for entertainment not advice)
Rating: really liked it
Ladies and gentlemen, I have met my new personal hero. I started reading this book and immediately felt like I was cushioned perfectly in cotton wool and marshmallows, covered in fluffy blankets with cherubs singing to me and playing with my hair.
In other words - this is genuinely one of the most lovely and funny and heartwarming memoirs I've read in my rather short life so far. I LOVE it more than I could possibly say. I laughed out loud (even on the tube which I find daunting) and cried on and off throughout as so many of Dolly's words rang true to me.
Dating stories are my kryptonite and insights about loss and love I am always, always more than happy to gobble up. I love reading about peoples' experiences with love - romantic love, friendly love, young love, lost love. I WANT IT ALL. I LOVE IT MORE THAN SPRITE
Whether you're single/dating/relationshipping/married, I highly recommend this. IT'S DIVINE. New all time favourite!
(Re-read in July 2019: just as brilliant, if not even better the second time. Will this be something I read every year? YES AND WHAT OF IT)
Rating: really liked it
Remind me to reread this book in three or five or ten or fifteen years.
Because it is great. It's just not the book I need right now.
I'm 24, and I have a good number of friends I wish I saw more, and I wish I had more, and I like hooking up when I want to even casually, and I like having drinks when I want to even casually, and though my brain isn't perfect it isn't because of those things.
The author doesn't say that it is, but it felt (to me) like there wasn't a lot of room for people in other places in their journey with love in this book.
Because the author moves from alcoholism to reduced drinking and/or sobriety, and because the author moves away from hooking up, and because the author is in a wonderful place with a sisterhood of friends, I couldn't find any room for myself in this book. Because I am happy without any of those things.
I didn't feel judged, exactly. This is a good and nonjudgmental book. I just felt maybe a little unwelcome.
It isn't on the author - it's on me! It's a pandemic and I'm so sensitive about the ways my life looks right now. It's hard already being in your early or mid-twenties and spending them in a state of lockdown. This book exacerbated that FOMO, a bit.
Anyway, the author never says you can't do any of these things, but if you do, or if you don't have an excess of platonic love in your life - if you have fewer friends or shallower relationships - you may not feel at home in these pages.
It's surely on me and not the author, but I didn't.
Bottom line: A good book for a future me!
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tbr reviewi've heard so much about this book in such a short amount of time that i have no choice but to take it as a sign from the universe
Rating: really liked it
I really wanted to like this book but I’ve been left disappointed. Lured in by the hype around it and also by the title, which should have probably been ‘everything I know about being single and having friends’. I thought it was a slight cop out to write a book supposedly all about what you know about love, then finish by saying “I’ve never really experienced it other than with my girl friends”. The value of your friendships is a fair point but should that really be the conclusion of this book?
The random emails and recipes are boring and could have been left out. It became tiresomely long and I was rushing to get to the end. Which is a shame because I thought I was enjoying the book in the first few chapters. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it really reads like an over-privileged, white middle-class woman, who doesn’t have much self awareness about her own privileges. I think she might think a lot of what she’s writing - about excessive drinking, drug taking, tinder dates, paying extortionate taxi fares for the lols - is relatable, and maybe it is for other people in her social bracket, but it’s not to me. There’s a level of self-deprecation and self-obsession that’s funny, but there’s too much of it in this book. Wouldn’t waste your time.
Rating: really liked it
Loooooved it! 😍😍😍
I'm a bit embarassed to admit that I hardly knew who Dolly Adlerton was before reading this book, but after finishing Everything I Know About Love, I'm now a massive fan!
Dolly took me on a journey through love, friendship, heartache and anxiety that was
relatable, honest and funny. Filled with disastrous dates, wild nights out but also moving stories about friendship, this book will make you both laugh and cry.
I heard this book being described as
Sex and the City for millennials and it absolutely is!!
Right, I'm off to buy copies of the book for all my girlfriends!
Rating: really liked it
all i have to say is that i love my best friend.
this was so profoundly and beautifully written while also being light and humorous. dolly alderton is obviously an incredibly talented writer & i am so happy i read this for one of my first books of 2022.
⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻⸻
“she knows where to find everything in me and i know where all her stuff is too. she is, in short, my best friend.”
rating: ⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑
this was my first full read of 2022, and i am so happy i started with this. this review is going to be more personal than my other reviews, so here is a tiny disclaimer.
there’s a certain addictiveness about dolly alderton’s writing. she’s funny, witty, and obviously an extremely good writer. i flew through the pages (while the initial 100 pages were rough + could have been cut down a bit, the rest of the book was so beautifully written that i couldn't help but give this five stars).
what i loved the most about this book is her friendships, especially the one she has with farley. i adored the way she spoke about her best friend, about how they are two halves of a whole and how they have left ‘no pebble unturned’. it did not take me long to realize that this memoir is not about men or relationships, it is more of a love letter to her best friend and the friendships she has in her life. i really appreciated that.
i cried big ugly tears and sent quotes to my own best friend because alderton encapsulated exactly how i feel about her; i love her to pieces and pieces, till death do us part, all the clichés.
this is my favorite part out of the entire book:
"i want to know what that feels like, to be truly committed to someone, rather than having one foot out the door."
"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 twenty-four."
"i'm talking about you and me," she said.
another thing i loved that she touched on was on the lull of life, which feels fitting to read about, especially during a pandemic where things are inevitably less ‘exciting’ than before. there’s a quote on getting older in your 20s that really resonated with me:
“you are realizing the mundanity of life. you are finally understanding how little point there is to anything. you are moving out of the realm of fantasy 'when i grow up' and adjusting to the reality that you're there; it's happening. and it's wasn't what you thought it might be. you are not who you thought you'd be.”
this hit me way harder than i thought it would. because i think it’s true in a sense: your twenties are most likely going to be much more anticlimactic than you thought it would be. i think the pandemic has especially left me disillusioned regarding some aspects of my life. but also, i do think that life is about appreciating the mundanity that is so despised, and realizing that usually, the small fleeting moments in life are the ones that truly matter.
whether it’s mundane or special, that’s up to you.
Rating: really liked it
I listened to Everything I Know About Love on audiobook, mostly during my commute. This was good and bad - good because I hate to not finish books and there's no way I would've finished this if I had to dedicate 100% of my attention to it, as opposed to listening whilst travelling, cleaning etc. However, the bad was that I perhaps would've interpreted it differently in book form. In audio form, I found Dolly frustrating, whiney and self-indulgent where I might have taken the written format more light heartedly.
I don't want to be too harsh about this memoir because it's ultimately someone's life and that feels wrong. However my low rating was largely due to the awful, selfish attitude Dolly takes to her friendships. I understand the odd pang of envy when friends are getting married and you're far behind, but Dolly seemed to genuinely wish for her friends lives to go wrong just so their attention could be focused on her. Yet when something does go wrong, she swoops in and describes all the things she said and did because she's such a great friend - it came across as incredibly self-indulgent.
There was the odd part of this book which made me think and reflect, but mostly I wanted it to end as I was so irritated by it. I didn't find it funny and, at one point, inadvertently groaned and willed it to stop out loud when it went on.. and on.. and on about some unfunny text messages about bins. If you do want to give this book a try, I'd recommend paper form as opposed to audiobook which I imagine makes it more light hearted.
Rating: really liked it
4.5 <333
‘everything i know about love’ is a recount of a woman’s life, as she growns up in london, reflecting on her experiences from childhood to her thirties. it’s a deeply personal, honest story, making it such a beautiful and thought provoking look into family & friendship, heartache and identity. throughout i really felt as if i was sitting down with dolly, and she was sharing her stories and life lessons with me.
honestly this book low key felt like free therapy. it taught me so so much, and i related to it in so many ways that it hurt. whilst it certainly dived into deeper issues such as addiction, grief and self worth it also has a continuously warm, reassuring energy. it made me feel like everything was going to be okay.
there were definitely parts of the memoir that weren’t for me. the start dragged a little and i didn’t care for the random recipes and email/ message excerpts scattered throughout. i skipped almost all of them. whilst i see they were added in to break up the really intense, emotional chapters, it still felt tedious and unnecessary.
but with that being said, despite these small elements, i loved this book and i think it’s so worth the read. it’s a novel rich with wisdom and fun storytelling and gorgeous, raw writing. i’ll never forget it!!
Rating: really liked it
I enjoyed it at the start for nostalgia reasons (yes, I remember the modern sound! I remember chatting on MSN!). But after a while, I found it quite repetitive, both of itself (here's another drunk story that I'm officially telling in a disapproving tone but really I'm quite impressed with how mad and fun I am) and just of loads of other writing (let's make fun of excessive hen dos/weddings etc like a million other people, let's talk about being true to yourself and liking yourself first before a relationship etc etc).
I quite liked the writing about female friendship at the end, and that started to make me try and rethink my impressions, as I think a focus on the love of female friendships is important and interesting. But I think my problem is that this isn't what it actually was - rather it was a focus on her, and she happened to have female friends as her most lasting connection, which felt very different (and it was all a bit 'look at me, I'm such a great friend') . I guess my main problem was that I found her very narcissistic and unlikeable. The tone and writing reminded me a lot of Caitlin Moran who I also find irritating and someone who states the obvious but thinks she's being really incisive.
Rating: really liked it
Bloody hell, pals. This book is sweet and silly, smart and serious. I would highly recommend.
I don't read an awful lot of auto-biographical stuff but I knew of Dolly already, through her PanDolly and High-Low podcasts with Pandora Sykes and her amusing dating column in the Sunday Times. And when it popped up on NetGalley, I wanted it. I wanted it real bad. So, yes: this is a NetGalley freebie but thoughts are my own, of course: what is the point otherwise?
So. Everything I Know About Love. That title isn't really a misnomer, not exactly, but it does set you up to think that it's about capital L Love - you know, Carrie Bradshaw's ridiculous, all-consuming, can't-live-without-it Love. But Dolly herself would be the first person to tell you that she has very little experience of that Love, actually. (Pun intended.) Would she like more? Yes. But has she been without love? That's a definite no there, my friend. This book is full of love, in its wild and various guises, but it shines most brightly in Dolly's over-whelming and supportive (but not always healthy) love for her friends, a tight knit group of woman who live with, live for, fight with and fight for each other. I won't lie; I was very jealous. Dolly, her best friend Farley and their extended group of wonderful women have something very special - and Dolly never, ever forgets that.
I was eager for this book, you know. I was hungry. And I gulped it all up in three big bites, staying up later than I really should to finish it off. I think the fun here for me was, admittedly, partly because because Dolly and I are both English and close in age. There were many similarities for us, although she is definitely a lot posher. I don't mind saying that I'm a bit older than her, so I did miss some of those cultural things, especially the pure sheer devotion to local MSN - I used it, too, but I talked to people in America who were a little ahead of us here. But there's always interest for me in people who started to come of age as the internet did. (That's probably self-absorbed, but there it is.)
And you know how they always say that New York is the fifth character in Sex and the City? Well, if London isn't a main role here, it was definitely a scene-stealing extra, popping up frequently and joyfully. Having lived in London for almost fifteen years now, I feel like the city was beautifully painted, mostly via a vividly ramshackle Camden Town.
The reoccurring lists in this book were a real highlight for me. Dolly writes a literal list of what she knows about love at different ages and, my god, if they weren't exactly the lists I would have written at the same times. If they haven't aged and mellowed just like I have. If they haven't sharpened and become less likely to take your bullshit just like I have. They were perfect, truly.
And one last thing I wanted to mention: Dolly writes a beautiful meditation on the difference between intensity and intimacy that left me reeling. A crazy, all-consuming relationship she has almost entirely over text which ends in a flurry of drama felt almost rude, the way it was pointing a big finger straight at me. I saw myself there and it made me put my Kindle down, as I was laying in bed next to the love of my life, and think about just that. I have been there, Dolly, I have lived that existence, confusing intimacy and intensity, trying to stretch the fizz of excitement into something more sustainable. But champagne goes flat and what you're left with after the bubbles have gone isn't entirely palatable. I loved it at the time and I'm so glad it's over. Thank you for writing about it so wonderfully, Dolly. Thanks for the wild ride.
Rating: really liked it
I really had to push myself to get through this one and at about 50% into it- I just couldn’t. Some people mentioned how It’s written in a very British way (humor wise) and that maybe the reason I didn’t get it but beside the jokes I might have missed, I just felt throughout how the storyline is just dragging for too long... I hope she found resolutions and life lessons by the end of it, unfortunately I couldn’t stick around to find out 😅
Rating: really liked it
I saw this book everywhere. It sat on my shelf for months because I wasn't quite sure what it was, and then I skimmed the first few pages and ended up reading the whole thing within 24 hours. It's funny and sad, and hopeful and realistic. It has a bit of Louise Rennison about it in the best way. Sobbed big chunky tears and laughed out loud many times. V good!!!!
Rating: really liked it
Was it meant to make me as sad as it did? Did it just hit too close to home when I, myself, am experiencing a sort of existential crisis?
Either way Dolly writes beautifully and honestly and it’s impossible for her words to not strike chords within you.
Rating: really liked it
I’d really hoped that I’d be able to relate to Dolly Alderton but this has to be one of the most privileged, entitled pieces of writing I’ve ever come across. Her experience as a woman in her 20s may ring true to an affluent minority but she’s certainly not representative of a vast majority of the population.
Very few people get to spend their twenties high as a kite and being completely self destructive whilst still obtaining an incredible job and having everything just work out for them. Can publishers please stop giving people like this a platform to publish this sort of self-indulgent, vacuous mess.
1 star ⭐️
