Everything I Know About Love

Dolly Alderton's first book, Everything I Know About Love, came out in 2018. It is a memoir, and the decade it covers runs from her school years in Britain to her late twenties, when she and her friends were living in the world they had been preparing for.

The material is drawn from her own life: her time at the University of Exeter, the years of sharing houses with friends, the relationships with men that went badly, the trouble she had with her own body, and the death of someone close to her. Alongside the narrative she uses other forms, including anecdotes, conversations in text messages and recipes, so the book reads less like a single story than like the contents of a life.

The thread running through all of it is friendship, and the argument the book makes, as its title suggests, is that the love between friends has mattered to her as much as any romance. It was the first of her books and found its largest readership among young women; she has since published a novel and a collection of her advice columns.