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A review by emmelinemontgomery
Everything I Know About Love: A Memoir by Dolly Alderton
funny
lighthearted
slow-paced
2.0
Dolly Alderton is an excellent writer. Her prose draws you in and whips you along with her and everything is so detailed and delightful to read that it’s sort of a joy being swept away by her. I loved the nostalgia of it all in the beginning but I kept waiting for her to get to a much deeper point.
A book cannot survive on vibes alone and that’s where this memoir fell apart for me. We’re told so many things about Dolly’s life but then what we’re shown is the most shallow parts and it all comes together into a big mess. Example: we’re told repeatedly that she was “terrible at being a teenager” and the examples she gives for this are superficial reasons like how she enjoys giving dinner parties and being independent. Then, for the rest of the book, she talks about things like how hard it is for her when her best friend Farley had a serious boyfriend or other parts of *actually* being an adult. She says insane things like she didn’t have time for the “love of her life” so they broke up. Or lists “how insanely in love with each other her parents are” as a reason why she’s unable to have a functional romantic relationship. I thought this was a joke at first but then I realized it might not be? Still unsure. I could go on listing the bonkers things in this book that I initially thought was a joke but later realized she was maybe actually serious about.
Her friendship with Farley is by far the most interesting part but even that running storyline is never deeply interrogated. Her relationship to her brother or parents isn’t discussed. We get bad dating stories that are funny but never really have a point. What does Dolly know about Love!? Idk. None of this has anything to do with learning about love in any of its forms. There are times when Dolly has really beautiful and insightful things to say but it’s lost in the mountains of random funny stories that while charming, wear thin after a while. I didn’t read the last two chapters because I was started to really hate this book and I thought I was going to absolutely love it when I started.
A book cannot survive on vibes alone and that’s where this memoir fell apart for me. We’re told so many things about Dolly’s life but then what we’re shown is the most shallow parts and it all comes together into a big mess. Example: we’re told repeatedly that she was “terrible at being a teenager” and the examples she gives for this are superficial reasons like how she enjoys giving dinner parties and being independent. Then, for the rest of the book, she talks about things like how hard it is for her when her best friend Farley had a serious boyfriend or other parts of *actually* being an adult. She says insane things like she didn’t have time for the “love of her life” so they broke up. Or lists “how insanely in love with each other her parents are” as a reason why she’s unable to have a functional romantic relationship. I thought this was a joke at first but then I realized it might not be? Still unsure. I could go on listing the bonkers things in this book that I initially thought was a joke but later realized she was maybe actually serious about.
Her friendship with Farley is by far the most interesting part but even that running storyline is never deeply interrogated. Her relationship to her brother or parents isn’t discussed. We get bad dating stories that are funny but never really have a point. What does Dolly know about Love!? Idk. None of this has anything to do with learning about love in any of its forms. There are times when Dolly has really beautiful and insightful things to say but it’s lost in the mountains of random funny stories that while charming, wear thin after a while. I didn’t read the last two chapters because I was started to really hate this book and I thought I was going to absolutely love it when I started.