Book Review: "Everything I Know About Love" by Dolly Alderton

Okay so I'm back to reading some Dolly Alderton. I call these sorts of books my 'treat books' because of their lightness and readibility. At the moment I am sitting up in bed, it's the early morning, I've just finished the book and I am in a lot of physical pain. I haven't been sleeping right, my shoulders are killing me and my legs are entirely in knots. I'm not really sure what to do here because I can't move a lot without being in some kind of pain. Anyways, let's have a look at what Dolly Alderton has to say about love...

Well the first thing is that love is never really a fully formed thing. It goes through iterations especially in the millennial age, of being almost exclusively online. I have to say that even though I did have MSN and very, very early Facebook, I did not have this experience. Though, I understand what the author is talking about. The way she talks about youthful romantic idealism (sometimes which is never even reciprocated by the other party involved) comes of as affectionate rather than embarrassing and so, that is what makes it different to other books. The fact that she found members of the band 'Busted' to be 'manly' really just says it all - I would find it very embarrassing to admit that if I even found one of them remotely attractive. Love is less a formed attribute of being human but a skills issue where this book and the author's failed relationships are concerned. And there are many of them.

Alderton views female friendship as being more important than romantic love. Her relationship with her best friend Farley is presented with the same intensity, devotion, and heartbreak often reserved for romantic partners. This starts to crumble once Farley puts her relationship first. There's a scene in the book where Alderton has a bit of a tiff with a man whilst trying to explain this shouldn't be the case. He simply thinks she is being unreasonable and in some ways, she is. People grow up and grow apart - nobody stays together forever. Friendship might be more reliable than romantic love, but it is by no means a placeholder for the future relationships of either party in the friendship. These sections are less funny and more emotional - a balancing act that the author is very good at as I have already observed in her book Ghosts.

There are reactions to crippling loneliness as well as relationships though and I'm not really sure about this part because the book almost introduces the fact that being in a relationship eliminates that sort of loneliness. However, this isn't really representative of the general popoulation (look around). The author often feels lonely and out of place within large groups of people - it's not really isolation which is concerning, but instead it is lonely as in it is void of a person to vent to or be with. The strings of dates, the arguments over losing her best friend to love, the drinking wine in a restaurant and wanting others to come with her only to find out they've all gone to bed or have something else to do - these are all presented to us as character flaws of the narrator and they are. But is it loneliness? There's the million dollar question. Personally, I would say no it isn't. I would say it is a middle class reaction to being in a situation where you basically have everything and you have probably read too many magazines about people partying in London.

The memoir progresses into different angles and avenues, looking at illness and mentality, looking at the ways in which friendships break and are reformed, looking at how the author copes with different (however first world) problems in her life. Dolly Alderton still gives the reader something to contemplate even if it is only a small concern to do with how love is fleeting and often undesirable. I found it difficult to relate to this book purely because I love very, very rarely and even then it is only really people I'm related to. I tend not to even like my real-life friends very much and yet, it's still healthy in its distance. But the author makes a great case for thinking about these things.