A review by lunabean
Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

5 stars😭 I hesitated reading this bc I’d felt that these books tend to talk of the same banal things: how love doesn’t make you whole, how friendships are equally important etc, through stories where the writer would ironically… obsess over romantic love & then learn from it all in the end. I’d expected myself to feel bitter reading this, wondering what it could possibly offer me that I don’t already know. HOWEVR

Yes all the cliches are there, but it didn’t feel trite or full of platitudes. Alderton made the book feel like a friend, a cozy warm thing, recounting her experiences in early adulthood: MSN, her first dates, her changing ideas of love, being mostly inebriated during uni, her first heartbreak, flat-sharing in london, her eating habits, sharing wisdom she’s learnt from these experiences. I found her uni stories particularly relatable, times when she felt like she owned London, her youth and her freedom. I felt exactly like this when I lived there, like I had to be having the most fun, every time, all the time.

With Alderton being 30 & me being in my mid-20s most of the things she’s written I relate to painfully. For eg I love how like Alderton in her twenties, I am also obsessive, painfully nostalgic, and envision love to be endlessly passionate and all-consuming. Alderton writes about the difference between intimacy and intensity through a relationship with a man she deeply connected with in a shockingly short amount of time that eventually ended as abruptly as it began.

She talks of the scariness of this transitionary time from your early adulthood to actual adulthood, how scary it is to no longer be the generation that decides what is relevant, to wonder what the point of it all is - “Is this it? TCR & ordering shit off Amazon?”

While the book shares insight into what it feels like to be a coming-of-age woman, we should note that Alderton is a straight white woman living in London, whilst poc & lgbt+ women have to bear the burden of all the extra struggles that come w the intersectionality of our race and sexuality. Apart from that, it has a lot of wisdom, spirit & honesty, full 5 stars😭🫶🏼❤️‍🩹