This was a surprisingly good read. Or listen, as I chose to go with the audio book method. I generally find it easier when it comes to non-fiction works to listen rather than read the physical book.
Quite simply, this is someone's life story. Up to the age of thirty. She wrote the book in 2018 and, when I checked, is 34 years old now.
It's interesting that the title on the cover has several words crossed out, like jobs and parties, before settling on Love. Dolly Alderton does a lot of talking about relationships and how they affected her. That's the main theme of the book, what she learned about love. Obviously. Everything else sort of fits around it.
She talks about how technology came to influence relationships, which I found interesting because it was the same for me, witnessing the progression of online messaging and how it changed the way we all communicate and have relationships. She goes on to discuss everything in her education, things that she did. How she became a writer.
Very central to the story is her friendship with Farly. Her best friend from school. It isn't just about romantic love, it's about so much more than that. It's about loving people, loving herself.
Dolly seems to have got up to a lot of things in her lifetime. She's worried people, had many embarrassments, relationships and break-ups. She's had battles with her mental health.
The final bit was how she turned thirty. Personally, I found this bit relatable, having had similar experiences on this count. Dolly remarks on the fact that where her birthday is means that everyone else turned thirty before she did, making it easier for her. A lot of my friends turned thirty before I did. I'm one of the youngest in my family, several friends are older than me. People I volunteer with and work with are a lot older than me. I was mistaken for a secondary school student a few weeks before my thirtieth and knew that, ultimately, I wouldn't feel any different turning thirty than I did on any other day.
There were many things I found relatable about Dolly's life and so I genuinely enjoyed listening to it.
Other than that, I can't say much about it. This is a well written auto-biographical novel about someone adapting to the twenty-first century, growing up and having many epiphany's and heart-aches along the way.
There is a sort of adaptation. I have started watching it and learned that it is actually a fictional version of the book. It uses fictional names, to the main characters are Maggie and Birdy, not Dolly and Farly. It was adapted by Dolly Alderton herself and at the start says something about how the story is loosely based on reality and fictionalised when reality didn't provide enough to work with. I think perhaps there wasn't enough to make a story flow freely so she wrote something that she felt worked.
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