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

1.0

my her campus articles have more depth and thoughts than this. (hit me up for the link) 🤣

I don’t even know where to begin if I’m honest. First, I was led into a sense of hopefulness by this paragraph: But I found the reality of boys to be slightly disappointing. Not as funny as the girls I had met there, not nearly as interesting or kind. I thought, well, maybe we’ll truly get some experiences that drive us to read about love, relationships and friendships.

Wrong.

It was blatantly obvious that a white suburban girl wrote this. Maybe that’s mean, perhaps. But it was so shocking to me (someone who rarely cares or researches the authors of the books she reads for the first time) that I can’t help but mention it. I want to be kind, but even as I tried to make sense of the years we were reading about and the difference in generation or culture, I didn’t feel too apologetic of my feelings. Because, at the end, there are some feelings that transcend generations and cultures. Friendships, love, growing up— these are all almost universal experiences that could translate into a million languages but that at the end are easy to transform into something almost anyone can identify with. Even if they are difficult to truly explain and put into words, the simple act of trying often makes people resonate with it. This did not achieve that for me.

For a book that titles itself “Everything I know about love” I think the execution is subpar. Almost half of the best quotes (even those most highlighted on kindle) about life and love were quotes from other people or authors. The writing wasn’t exactly bad, but it was basic. A woman who had SO MANY experiences (crazy, drunk and drug addled experiences but still), and we didn’t have any real writing that tugged at my feelings. No grand metaphors, no lyrical sense of life. 

Perhaps i should’ve lowered my expectations, but I just truly thought we would get some true substance about a book with such a title. I had to physically push myself to finish this, the emails/letters and recipes felt like nothing to me when much of the book was so infuriating. I don’t need to know how to make scrambled eggs and read about you doing MDA the next page. It doesn’t have the effect you think it could. It’s a memoir, I know. I know the author will tell THEIR story, but I believe that with so much to tell, they still told nothing at all. With so much experienced, I feel the book could’ve been MUCH better, more deep, more heartfelt. There were some good parts, of course, we read about the authors life throughout YEARS, her experiences with one night stands, parties, friends, and even with grief at some point (hers and her best friend’s) so it’s likely to find some sentences that make you feel at least something, I’m human, after all, not a monster. But two chapters, five sentences and a few good paragraphs out of an entire book are not enough. 

If you identified with this or loved it, no hate to you. But this is no masterpiece. I keep wondering what I learned about love from this, and I can simply say that I rectified that love is indeed a universal language that can manifest in different ways, but that some people still truly, truly still fail to even try to properly grasp it into words. 

1.25 and only because I didn’t actually hate it, just truly didn’t enjoy it. 

this was a book club read that no one enjoyed. <3