Everything I Know About Love is a rapidly-paced, continually entertaining, and poignant read. Dolly Alderton has a flair for finding humor and heart in a vast spectrum of moments, from the mundane and relatable, embarrassing and cringeworthy, to the thrilling, celebratory, unsettling, and tragic. Reading her memoir feels like watching a comedy by way of the UK’s BBC Three and Channel 4, or a joint UK/US or Irish/US co-production. Alderton’s visual style, attention to dialogue, and ease with setting up outrageous and laughable scenarios lends well to adaptation.

Her account of her early days growing up in the suburbs and attending an all-girls’ secondary school is similar in ambience to BBC Three’s “Some Girls” and Channel 4’s “The Inbetweeners.” Her wayward college days have a vibe that is a cross between Channel 4’s “Fresh Meat” and RTE/Netflix’s “Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope.” The essays covering her post-grad, early career years start out resembling Channel 4/Netflix’s “Crashing” and the first two seasons of the Channel 4-turned-Netflix series “Lovesick.” As she progresses in her career and later, transitions from her twenties to her early thirties, the narrative tone shifts to more of the third and fourth seasons of “Lovesick.”

Throughout all of the highs and lows, the connective tissue that shines through and pulls everything together is the history, knowing shorthand, myriad rituals, and steadfast love and acceptance she shares with her close circle of girlfriends and housemates. The unshakeable bond between Alderton and her friends jumps off the page. In this collection of autobiographical essays, sardonic asides, and unexpected recipes, platonic love is an anchor that rivals romantic love in its strength and reliability. Alderton’s sometimes rocky journey to self-love ultimately arrives at a hopeful beginning as she embraces her third decade of life and all of the separate and shared experiences that lie ahead. 

LOGLINE: Journalist and former Sunday Times columnist Dolly Alderton weaves together a raucously funny collection of stories of love in various forms as she chronicles her friendships, dating misadventures, media career trajectory, experimentation, partying mishaps and successes, and personal growth from her suburban adolescence, through her wild university days and pivotal post-grad twenties, up to her thirtieth birthday. 

MOOD: An interesting cocktail that’s part laughter, excitement, and romance; part cringe, existential despair, and tragedy; and part deeply heartfelt moments, platonic love, and self-evolution. A quick-paced and perfectly imperfect, factual coming-of-age portrait comparable to Scaachi Koul’s One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, that reads like a sitcom or late-night comedy.      

TITLE: Everything I Know About Love

AUTHOR: Dolly Alderton

GENRE: Memoir, Humor, Essays, Women’s Friendships, Romance, Relationships, Media, Coming-of-Age, Mental Health 

RELEASED: January 2018 (UK first edition); February 2020 (US digital edition)

PUBLISHER: Fig Tree, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK; HarperCollins

LENGTH: 490 pages (digital edition)

ADAPTED FOR TV: BBC One (UK) and Peacock (US), June 2022