A review by jeimy
Everything I Know About Love: A Memoir by Dolly Alderton

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring lighthearted reflective medium-paced

4.0

 
y’all. this book put me THROUGH it. 😩 
 
rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5 
 
📝 review: 
so here goes—i really struggled to get through the first part of this book.
the first 30% of dolly’s memoir was mostly about her relationship with alcohol and going out as much as possible, which was really hard for me to read given that it felt repetitive and unrelatable to me.
at the very least it should have started with a heavy content warning. 
 
then the next 10% or so was all about how she hated her best friend’s first serious partner, which just felt like mad hater-ade! i honestly found myself wondering how they’re still friends after all the evil eye that was thrown, lol.
 
BUT, thankfully, the latter half of this book touched me so so deeply. (and now i see the hype!) reading this alongside all about love really made me think deeply about love as a theoretical concept, and how to pour deeply into all of my relationships—not just my romantic one. shout out to all my girlfriends & sisters who i adore more than life itself. 
 
🔖 read this if you like: 
  • raw, witty, funny writing 
  • loving on your girlfriends 
  • chapters interspersed with recipes, lists, short stories
  • a good cry
 
💭 my fave quotes:
 
“There isn’t a pebble on the beach of my history that she has left unturned. She knows where to find everything in me and I know where all her stuff is too. She is, in short, my best friend.”
 
“You were made so that someone could love you. Let them love you.”
 
“I thought about how we’d known each other for twenty years and how, in all that time, I’d never got bored of her. I thought of how I’d only fallen more and more in love with her the older we grew and the more experiences we shared.”
 
“Life is a wonderful, mesmerizing, magical, fun, silly thing. And humans are astounding. We all know we’re going to die, and yet we still live. We shout and curse and care when the full bin bag breaks, yet with every minute that passes we edge closer to the end. We marvel at a nectarine sunset over the M25 or the smell of a baby’s head or the efficiency of flat-pack furniture, even though we know that everyone we love will cease to exist one day. I don’t know how we do it.”
 
from the acknowledgements:

“And, finally, thank you to Farly, without whose unwavering cheering and championing I would not have written this book. You are—you always will be—my favorite love story.”
 
gah, i’m in my feels all over again. 

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