Poured Over: Dolly Alderton on Good Material

By Jenna Seery / February 1, 2024 at 6:00 am

What can we do when our storybook romance ends? Good Material lets us laugh our way through the thick of heartbreak with sharp wit, the warmth of friendships and all too relatable moments from the throes of a breakup. Alderton joins us to talk about writing from the male perspective, the things we all do when our hearts get broken, the unspoken grief when relationships don’t work and more with guest host, Jenna Seery. We end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Mary.   

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Jenna Seery and mixed by Harry Liang.         

Featured Books (Episode):
Good Material by Dolly Alderton
Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton
Ghosts by Dolly Alderton

Featured Books (TBR Topoff):
Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors
Josh and Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating by Christina Lauren

Full Episode Transcript
Jenna Seery
Today, I am so excited to be talking with Dolly Alderton about her new novel, Good Material. There are two very important books that she has written that have impacted my life greatly. That’s Ghosts, and Everything I Know About Love. She has been a journalist, a columnist, a podcaster. Really anything you can think of with the written word Dolly has done. And so I am so excited to have her with us today.

Dolly Alderton

Hello, thank you for having me.

So I always think that I can give a really great description of a book, but I think it’s so much better when the author themselves gives their sort of elevator pitch for us. And we’re gonna say spoiler free, because there’s some really incredible reveals and fun things that are in here. But I just wonder if you could set up the book for us.

Of course, Good Material is the name of my second novel. It’s a kind of study of a broken relationship, mostly told from the perspective of the dumpee, who is 35 year old comedian Andy Dawson, who feels like the love of his life has just exited the relationship with zero explanation. And then the last kind of 20% of the book is told from the perspective of Jen, his girlfriend who ended the relationship. And they’re kind of mysteries that he tries to solve. In the in his portion of the book that the reader kind of goes on that journey with him. And then a lot of those mysteries are resolved and paid off when you hit Jen side of the relationship.

I love that aspect of being with Andy for so much of the story, and you sort of get one sense of things that happen. But you also know like, as any story goes, when there’s two people involved you like, some of these things just can’t quite be right. But Andy’s voice is so great. I think so often, we think of this kind of book being told, from a woman’s perspective. So often this kind of story is told from women’s perspectives. But this was so easy to just jump in with him. And even though it’s like, a voice that I don’t always seek out when I’m reading, I was so glad I was so glad to be in it and to have sort of that narrative piece go through.

I’m so pleased because, you know, the female perspective is something that I spend my whole life in the female perspective, basically, my friendship groups are the female perspectives, the women I work with, it’s the female perspective, or my readers, the female perspective, only read women’s books really now, I kind of only listen to Joni Mitchell on repeat, you know, I’ve spent my life that the last kind of particularly like eight years, I suppose, like really consciously, in very female spaces, and in a very female mindset, and, you know, women, am I saying women, women know, my people, or my audience and readers are women. And I feel like it would have been so natural for me to just write a story about female heartbreak. And I can say, see what that book would have been. I really wanted to challenge myself as a novelist and also as a human and exercise empathy and imagination and kind of understand boys a little better, which you have always been a group of people that I’ve been kind of endlessly fascinating, confused by. As part of my research the book, I interviewed 15 men, and asked them lots of personal questions about heartbreak and breakups and male friendship and sex. And the thing I actually found out which I can’t believe I didn’t know already, but it really crystallized for me in my research is heartbreak is not a female experience. devastation and rejection and madness that comes in the wake of unrequited love. I think we, we hear a feminine version, like telling of that story a lot, but men go just as nuts as we do. It’s just as painful for them. They just on the whole culturally don’t have the same spaces to process those emotions in the same way that women have been socialized to think.

I mean, so often, my female friends and I will sit around and be like, what do straight men do when they just hang out with each like, there’s such a narrow view on even what like male friendship is and how they lean on each other for support or how they navigate those difficult things. Because like you said, there is this idea that if a relationship ends or if there’s even a fight that, you know, the woman is emotional and distraught and dealing with these things, but we know how women, you know, culturally reach out to and get support from their friends. But that aspect of male friendship in this novel, I think is really important to sort of lean on in a sense of, okay, no, this is something that happens, regardless of gender. There’s these support groups, and it looks different, but it’s there.

It is still there. Because, you know, when I was doing those interviews, I was so ready for the men that I spoke to, to confound all my expectations, I was so ready for them to say, no, actually, when I have a broken heart, my friends, and I will sit and talk about it for months on end, and I feel very comfortable crying, and I feel I don’t feel like I have to make it funny for them. Or I wanted to hear that because I didn’t want to be gender essentialist I didn’t want to be retrograde about it. I didn’t, I didn’t want to have these like archetypes of how men and women behave. I don’t think that that’s like particularly helpful in conversations about gender. But I had to, I had to write what I found. And you know, I couldn’t write something as an experiment, an intellectual experiment. For me, I had to write about real humans. And the real human story that I got from all these men, regardless of their age, or personality, or interests, or class or background, is that all of them had strong support networks of male friends. But they definitely didn’t feel that those networks were a place where they could really talk about the humiliation and the frustration and the despondency and sadness of unrequited love and being dumped, I suppose for want of a better word that equally what I tried to get across in the book is, that was every single man said that to me in the research, and every single one of them said how much they love their friends. So I wasn’t trying to write Andy in his friendship group there, that you know, there is within that group, a deficiency, I suppose that in terms of emotional support for each other, or even emotional language, I think that we see with Jen and her friends that they’re like, totally fluent in. That doesn’t mean that they don’t love each other in their own way and show up for each other in the only way that it’s possible for that group of men to in the to do in the culture that we’re in, in the way that they’ve been brought up.

And something that is apparent across your work. I know it comes up a lot in Everything I Know About Love is this importance of friendship as love, and the role that that plays in all of our lives. And I was saying before we started recording that I read Good Material and Everything I Know About Love, again, very close back to back and they play so well with each other, I recommend everyone to do it, because you’re gonna get a lot of insights. I had a lot of like aha moments, even though I feel in some ways I’ve passed by some of the ages in Everything I Know About Love, but it still hits just the same. And that sort of balance between romantic love and the sort of platonic steadfast relationships in our lives, like Andy and his best friend who have been close for their entire lives. It sort of puts things in a little different perspective.

Yeah, it’s so interesting, you should draw that comparison. Because, you know, the book hasn’t come out in America yet. So who knows, everyone in America may hate it and may tank. But I’ve had a really positive response to it in England, really positive, I would say maybe the most positive response I’ve had to my work since Everything I Know About Love. And it’s not even about the positive the light nature of the positivity, it’s more like, the reaction that I’m getting from readers is that it’s, it’s that same very emotional reaction, that Everything I Know About Love seemed to give people and, you know, I don’t think it’s healthy or becoming it to dwell too much on the reaction to one’s work and analyze it. But there is something interesting there that I think I’ve noticed, which is, people really want to feel something, when they read something, I know that that’s what my readers come to my work for. Whether that is hopefulness, or gratitude for their friendships, or a sense of peace, about the mistakes and forgiveness about the mistakes that we make or faith in love and romance. And I think a lot of the work that I’ve done in between and I don’t regret this because I think it was the work that I needed to do then like when I think about the first novel that I wrote Ghosts, it was much more a book about trying to make people think I suppose, I think I was like presenting a lot of ideas that I was having about gender and about biology and dating and the double standards of kind of gender double standards of dating and about aging and, and I hope that it made readers think and I also put my readers feel but there’s, I suppose there’s less ideas in good material. And there’s more feeling. I suppose that those reading experience with Everything I Know About Love and Good Material I am seeing that there is a stream there, there’s such different stories. I think that their feelings without spoiling the ending of good material, a lot of what I was working with it with the sort of not message of Good Material, but the kind of final note is about what it is to live a life that isn’t that is unconventional, I suppose, and what it is to be comfortable in yourself, which, I suppose is kind of everything the last pages of Everything I Know About Love is about actually.

I think the voice feels similar too, I think, Good Material, in a certain way, compared to Ghosts, I think maybe in this idea of thinking and feeling. There’s a looseness, I guess in Good Material, there’s a there’s just this real sense of connection, I think in the writing in the voice that brought my reading brain back to Everything I Know About Love this, like confident way that you’re putting all this forward is really something that I think readers will connect with, like you in the idea that we’re looking to feel, as I was reading this, I was thinking there’s a distinct lack recently of like, good breakup novels have this idea of heartbreak represented, I think people are looking for that kind of thing. We have so many stories of love and romance and the starts of relationships, but sometimes, relationships end and sometimes those things that, you know, I think about sometimes these like big romance novels, and you wonder, like, they can’t all be together forever, even all these great romcoms that they don’t all work out. So sometimes there has to be a book about what happens when it ends.

Yeah, and I just, you know, I’ve wanted to write about what happens when it ends, forever. Like, since my first heartbreak, I’ve kind of wanted to write about the loss of a big love, like have a big relationship and a world merged. I think different types of people process breakups differently. And I’m slightly embarrassed to say that I have always found it unbearable, I’ve always found it a totally unacceptable part of being human, I can’t accept it. Accept that we have to do this, that we fall in love with someone. And we get to know their mind and their body and their family members and their childhood and their pain and their pleasure and work out all the things that annoy us about them. And we find a way to live with that. And then we work out all the things we love the most. And we find a way to cherish those things and and then we hand ourselves over with trust to be seen and understood in the same way. And then we nurture each other. And sometimes we live together and you merge worlds and books and friends and homes and pets and then and then it stops and then it ends and then it just don’t understand like all the practical stuff, like what do you do with the letters? What do you do with the gifts? What do you do with the home and the animals? Like what do you do with the memories and all the things that they have given to you and all the ways in which they’ve loved you, you have to find a way of incorporating that into the woman that you then move on to be in the next person fall in love and you have to keep doing it you have to keep finding the hope to try and do it again all over again with someone else I just don’t really know how we will do that and have time to do anything else. So we have to do that and also have jobs. It’s just I find it I’m just a super sensitive intense person I think and I just I just have the most extraordinary or for humans that we just we can just keep doing this over and over again.

Sometimes you have to have a fight with your ex and the bank when you’re trying to separate your account it’s a lot there’s a lot of things that go through you know that I think don’t get talked about very much again we have so much like cultural knowledge of what it’s like to fall in love and all those things about how we start these relationships and yet no one talks about you know, maybe you talk with your closest friends about yeah okay I’m struggling with this and I need you know, we have to do all these things. We have to split apart stuff and all that but no one talks about I think in like a lot of literature we see a lot of like, the dramatic pieces, but it’s often the mundane little things that are the most difficult.

It’s just grief, I think, isn’t it? I think that we’re still not talking about heartbreak really in, in the language of grief. And you know, something the other day that I was thinking about is like, you know, that awful thing that happens when someone that you love dies. And then there’s the first moment you see their name on your phone. Like, we’re all when you see your whatsapp history with them, or you’re staring like, they’re never going to be online again, they’re never going to reply to my text again. And there’s something that is about that, which is so mundane and so nothing. But there’s something about what that represents existentially about how you live your lives together and how you don’t know, that is I find almost more difficult than the days after a funeral. You know, I thought I would for I have historically always found that that stuff really hard. I apologize that I’m admitting this, but I have to for the sake of the anecdote, I was on Amazon buying something. I’m so sorry. Um, it wasn’t, it wasn’t a book, it was a very rare food products that you can only buy on Amazon, UK. That’s the only reason why I was on that dreadful website. Looking back at you know, when it’s like who you send it to, and then the options come up of me. And it’s mostly like all the different apartments that I’ve lived in, in London.

You have to make sure you don’t accidentally send something to an apartment you lived in before.

But then there was this crazy thing was like, God, there are a lot of addresses here. And I went through the addresses. And it was like 11 boys were on those addresses from like, the last 15 years, who I’d sent little poetry books to, or who I’d like, you know, seen something and an album, I’d sent them. And that was what was so weird as I was looking at these names, and these addresses that were once so familiar, and remembering those roads and those bedrooms, from like, 2011, or whatever. And I was like, I don’t even know who lives in that house anymore. I don’t even know what that room looks like. I don’t know where that man lives. It was like seeing or like a line of ghosts that in front of me. And it did do something to me. And that again, it’s like a weird existential grief thing of this person was so involved in my life they were so flesh and blood. And now, I don’t even know what their postcode is, I wouldn’t even know where to send them. I don’t know who they’re living with. But you know, that’s the stuff that I think I’ve always found really hard to get my head around.

The world just keeps turning. You just have to keep going no matter what. And it’s hard because I think there are people who are much better at it than others. I have friends that have gone through like crazy breakups, you know, huge things. And they’re like, well, and I’m like, well, it’s so wild to me.

That’s really difficult in romcoms how quickly everyone moves on from their relationships. You know, when that comes where it’s like, you remember with Runaway Bride, when they before the wedding, she’s like, I’m so sorry. I know, we’ve been planning this wedding for ages and we’re madly in love and live together. I would actually prefer to marry this weird reporter who I met a week ago. And everyone’s a bit like, Okay, sure.

In Sleepless in Seattle, when everyone is like, upset that this man is still grieving his wife.

Yeah. Yeah, that’s the one place where I feel like rom coms have like, let me down rather than enriched me in life. I’m like, how come no one ever goes nuts after a breakup in the way that I always have done? Maybe because it’s kind of boring to watch. But, you know, I can find it like, a really interesting altered mental state when someone’s in the first months after a breakup. You know, when you’ve got a best friend who rings you and it’s just like, it’s done. He’s moved out, come over. Like, I feel like I never see my friend more like wildly animalistically alive in those first nights of like, she’s crying and then suddenly she’s saying all the things that she can’t live without him. And then the next breath, she’s like, maybe I’m gonna start my whole life again. And who’s my next love gonna be? It’s just like, it’s such a crazy altered state, I think.

I always just have to look at my friends and be like, just don’t get bangs. Don’t change. You can’t do it. This isn’t the time.

I literally had to have that conversation with a friend go through a breakup recently. I was like, please don’t please, don’t touch those. Like just give it six months, right?

Yeah, you’ve got to sleep on that more because you won’t be happy about it’s never good. And then everyone else knows it’s a whole thing.

Yeah, I actually kind of fell foul a bit. I had a breakup a lot rubbish right before Christmas last year, four days before Christmas, which was not great. The breakup. It was when I was right it was halfway through Good Material. Gods were looking down on me they were giving me a gift, but I remember like, the exact moment like in the months after that I had that breakup was the exact moment that my algorithm on Instagram decided to harass me with videos of Gen Z beauty bloggers, with those with those like long noughties, bobs like, bobs, like heavily layered, and they’re using all the Velcro rollers and whatever. And I just was like, right, well, this is obviously my path. It’s gonna things are lining up really well how to break up and now I’m being served this haircut constantly. I think I think we know what to do. And my friend Caroline, like, absolutely begged me not to she was like, I just think that long Bob is gonna look very different on a 35 year old woman to a Gen Z beauty blogger. I would just really sit on it. And you know what, thank God I did.

There’s a lot of upkeep involved there that they don’t show. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, almost like I’d have to style my hair every day. No, I can’t.

Yeah, no one’s doing that. That’s exactly it. No one’s doing that.

I think the next time I go through a breakup, I really need Andy’s mom to be there for me, because she seems to be the only one who’s really getting it in a lot of ways. And yeah, here you go. Here’s the things you’ll need.

Do you know what it’s I’m always so interested with writers and filmmakers, like, what the stock characters are that just that return and return over and over again, because I think if you can’t help but always write a character, it’s even in a totally fictional way. It says something of how you were raised or what was most important to you in life. Like for example, something I noticed with Richard Curtis’ films is there is always an adorable sister. There is always a younger sister, or a younger woman, best friend who is, you know, fragile, but eccentric and naive, but beautiful in the way that she sees the world whether that’s like Scarlet in Four Weddings, or Honey in Notting Hill. And then, when I read more about Richard Curtis, his life that reflected the home he grew up in, and he had these sisters that he completely adored. And I think like the one piece of biography that will be in every show that I write, and every novel that I write is a loving mum is a is a mum, who always knows what to say. And a woman who’s kind of emotionally intelligent and wise, as well as good human is the one thing that I can’t imagine anything else. And I just feel like it’s kind of my tribute to her.

And I mean, all of your, like, side characters in this novel are incredible. And but Andy’s mom is really one of those things where it’s like, oh, I think that’s how you know he’s going to be okay. Through is like through connection to her. And as again, I was saying before, and you know, all of us here in the office, we’re big Morris fans, is one of the best characters, really any of the friends Kelly, the incredible personal trainer, it’s easy to sort of connect with a main character protagonists, you’re right in their head, but yet, we all know what it’s like to have these like strange, really intense figures in our lives who fit just like in one sliver of our being and we’re like, alright, and often they just are there for a period of time, but we’re like, Yeah, remember when and everyone has those like side characters from their friends lives that they know like, remember when you knew that person at your job, and that just becomes a running joke forever?

And those people are an important squares in the patchwork quilt of your everyday life. Whether that is a personal trainer, or the man that you lodge with. I love writing kooks. I do just love it. I like writing those periphery kooks. I like eccentrics, the idea for Morris, who’s Andy’s landlord who he lives with who’s in his late 70s. It all came from a conversation I had with my friend Tim at dinner years ago, where he was talking about he volunteers with elderly people. And he was talking about someone who he was volunteer visiting and was buying food for and just checking in on about how he had this absolute obsessed. He was a conspiracist. And he had this obsession with Julian Assange, and was kept writing these letters, these passionate letters to him that whenever I hear little stories like that, I’m like, I’ve got to file that away for a periphery Kook. I just I just love it. I just, I just live with those sorts of people. They just make life so much more interesting.

And there are always those details where I read and I think like that has to be something real because it’s too late. Nice to have made up some sometimes these things I’m like that has to be actually from a real life person because it’s too specific to have been made up.

Yeah. What do you know what I’ve really learned from writing fiction and writing scripts is that nothing comes from nothing. Nothing can be created in a vacuum. Years and years ago, I remember watching a documentary about the Harry Potter books, and discovering that JK Rowling had created so much of the mythology of Hogwarts and the magical land from like the church from stuff that she had absorbed from being in church and Margaret Atwood famously with The Handmaid’s Tale, there was nothing in that world about the treatment of women that hadn’t been directly taken, taken from biblical references or things that had happened in history. You know, I remember hearing that the idea the whole idea for the horse whisperer came because the author had been at a dinner in the countryside in England, and had heard it this dinner, someone who owned a farm saying that there was a man on this farm that apparently could communicate with horses, and then that became the whole thing. So actually, like, I think I had this real idea that fiction and yeah, scripts were just about, like, it germinated from nothing like it just but it doesn’t, everything comes from something. Yeah.

And there’s so many of those connections. And I think that as readers to going through, we all assign our own sort of meanings to things as well, like, there’s characters that, I mean, I don’t know these people, they might come from the author’s life, but they always ring a bell of somebody or a situation is like a I can, I can really relate to that, because I had this, and those like, where those two things meet where the author’s like, influences. And what the reader brings me is like the best place in literature when they all just come together. And I think that that is going to happen with so many people and good material, because the situations, though they can be like really heightened. That’s what love and life and loss is like so often, emotionally.

You know, there are moments in it that that are really heightened. But heartbreak is a heightened emotional state. It’s an intense emotional state. And I suppose what you’re doing with characters on the page or on TV is you’re just actualizing what the rest of us are going through internally, I suppose, like all of us have imagined, what it would be to wring your ex on a withheld number sort of 100 times you hear their voice. And I suppose like, fiction is the place where you can dare to be the person who would do that. And we’ll all understand the person who would do that. But I hope that those like more heightened moments of the of the book in Andy’s heartbreak, I hope that the feelings and the end of the objectives of how he gets there, that that’s something relatable to anyone who’s gone. Totally insane from heartbreak, and I think we become strangers to ourselves in heartbreak.

And yet, there are so many moments I was reading, I was like, Andy, don’t do this. I know it’s going to be bad. You know, it’s going to be bad. Why? And yeah, and I think we’ve all had that conversation with friends. But we’ve all had that conversation with ourselves to have like, you when you know, you shouldn’t do it. But you’ve already done it. You’ve made up your mind. You’ve you know, you’re looking at someone’s Instagram through the browser because you’ve blocked them.

The number of times, my friends had conversations with me or I’ve had conversations with them. Where like the week before, we’ve had a dinner where it was like the Senate has been assembled. And we’ve all collectively decided like, we’re going to block him like all of us are going to block our friend’s ex like yet. We don’t want to know what he’s doing whatever. And then a week later, a friend will ring me in tears being like, can you believe he was at bla bla with her? And I’ll be like, what, how do you know that so well, obviously. It’s like the most horrible confession that you have to make, right? Uh huh.

It’s a lot. There’s a lot of the politics that goes into I think, especially again, for women, that idea of like communally ostracizing someone’s ex or, you know, the first text being my first text is usually do you need me to beat him up? Like, you know, it’s gonna be okay.

We love the community ostracization, our superpower. And I love that I’m like now officially entering early middle age and me and my friends deployed it in every breakup. Petty and we just love doing it. You know, I think it’s like in the depths of despair. It’s just this like one little golden nugget that you can have. It’s just knowing this man that’s treated you horribly has realized that like all her friends…

You know, and that’s all you get, you know, he’s sitting knowing that y’all are talking about it.

It’s such a like there are so few little treats that you get from being a heartbroken person. And I think like, that’s such a petty little treat that I will enjoy forever.

The worst is when your friend says, Please don’t be mean to him.

I fortunately, I’ve never had friends say that, we’re all this petty.

It makes me think too, in a sort of a different way about, I think there’s a line you talk about in Everything I Know About Love about how women have to slot into men’s lives more easily than the other way around. And I think that’s part of why Andy struggles so much is that, you know, he didn’t realize, and as men often don’t how much Jen entered into his life and fit in all those gaps and empty spaces, and made it fuller and made it brighter and supported him in all these ways. And he cannot understand why he can’t see that connection between why I feel so horrible.

And the other thing that I do really, like, I really, really feel for men when they have a breakup. And not only do I see this with like my male friends and my ex-boyfriends, but I see it with like, men, my parents age, if they like get divorced, or if they like tragically lose their wife is like, I think for so many men, I think this is changing. But I think traditionally and historically, to so many men, their entire access to their emotional inner life is their female partner, that she is the key to all of it. Bad day at work. That’s the person they talk to grief about a family member, that’s the person they speak to, like so many women I know, are kind of the only receptacle for their male partners entire emotional conversation with themselves and like deepest feelings. So when that’s taken away, you know, I think what Andy struggles with is there is only one person that he would come home to like when he’s feeling this bad and loss that he would come home to or go to the pub with, and really, really expose the minutiae of everything he’s feeling. And that’s the one person that he can’t call. And women don’t on the whole have that there’s always someone we can call.

It is certainly a different perspective reading through because trying to put myself in Andy’s position, like you said, I’d be like, well, I could handle it this way. But he just doesn’t have both the like external and internal resources to sort of know that. And I think he you know, there is progress made through the he definitely has an arc he learns as he goes through, because I think if he didn’t, this would be a pretty tough read to just like, watch him slam his head up against the wall. Yeah. But you know, it is one of those ideas that sometimes the heartbreak is the learning thing you need.

And the thing that I’m so interested in with heartbreak is it’s next to death in terms of you dying, or someone you love dying, it is the worst pain a human can feel. And yeah, we all go through it, every single one of us goes through it, but it is so painful wanting to be with someone who doesn’t want to be with you is it feels like a violation of human rights. It’s not being able to love the person you love in a present way. It just feels like barbaric, it’s so painful. And yet, one of the greatest human rights is that no one has to be with someone they don’t want to be with. You get one life, and no one is obliged to be in a relationship they don’t want to be in. So how do we allow those two truths to exist? It’s really hard.

Yet, we all keep doing it. And we all keep pushing forward and talking to our friends about it.

Keep downloading those bloody apps, come on, let’s have another.

It is the biggest thing because it’s like, you know, what does anyone want anyone wants to feel that connection. It’s the risk is so great, but the reward is pretty amazing to so I think we all just keep going and keep talking to our friends and calling them in the middle of the night.

You got to keep going. The thing that I have come to realize about breakups, which I do now by like, equate to grief is, you know, it’s a cliche for the week for a reason about grief being the price we pay for love, like the depths of grief that you feel in the wake of a broken relationship is only ever a reflection of the you know the cavernous depth of love that you felt, and it’s an honor to have loved someone that much. And it’s kind of easy to withdraw from it completely. And I have at times in my life thought, now I just the risk is too high. And the rewards are not great enough for me right now, potentially, for what the what the risk is. But I think every time that you have a breakup, or you have a broken heart, and you’re grieving someone, it’s a sign that you’re participating in life, it’s a sign that you’re a part of something, it’s a sign that you’re unafraid to connect, and that’s something that we should all be proud of.

I think so often, that’s why we come to literature, and we come to I think, especially fiction, because we can have those sorts of feelings reflected at us in a way that’s really accessible. And, you know, I know, I have often read books and felt like, oh, I never realized that that’s why I felt like that. But through that character’s, you know, sort of experience or through an author’s, you know, way of wording something, you can have a lot of that stuff reflected back at you. And it doesn’t feel like reading necessarily, like self help or something that’s really like punching you in the face with it. It’s more like yeah, all right, this is a human experience. And we’re all sitting with it.

Totally. I remember the first time that I was broken up with, I was living at home with my mum and dad. And one of the most powerful pieces of advice I had, in that time wasn’t even a piece of advice. It was just some words, some comforting words, was the day my dad came home from work that after it had happened, I hadn’t seen him, my dad, who at this point would have been like, his 60s, who’s like, quite conservative fellow, like, very alpha male and not hugely emotional. And he just came in to see me, and he gave me a huge hug. And he just said, we’ve all been there. And it was like, I have not even entertained the possibility. But this is a feeling that my dad had ever had in his life. And it was like, suddenly blew open the world for me this way. You know, I was, you know, probably quite an adolescent way of looking at the world that every feeling I have probably I was the first to have it. But you know, I was just like, no one is immune from this. This is a part of the package deal of being on earth and being part of human and being involved with others in tangled up in each other’s lives. None of us get out of this without this feeling at least once.

In this book, I think things something that’s really interesting is the timeline you sort of put us on we’re very, like, ascribed to dates. And I think that when you’re in that headspace time feels like both huge and very small, like every day is both the longest and shortest day as you move forward. But definitely some things are skipped over. Like you can’t obviously have everything in and I always wonder, are there like scenes that are on the cutting room floor somewhere that you wish you could have added in?

So first of all, I love that you’ve noticed that about dates, because that was something that I think initially they were like, this is kind of weird, like it’s diary entries. But it’s not diary entries. And why is it’s the specific the days and the dates and the numbers and the month. Because I was like, all you’re doing is living whenever I’ve had a breakup, particularly when I’ve been broken up with. You’re doing these weird, childish maths games of like, right? Well, it’s been this amount of time since I heard from them, which means probably if I double that, then that at that moment, they’ll call me, or it’s this amount of time until their birthday. And when it’s their birthday, I’ll get to finally send them a text in a legitimate way. And then I might be recovered weekend or something or this time a year ago, this is where we were or it’s now been half the time or you do this like magical thinking, I think to try and get some sort of sense of control over this completely uncontrollable situation. So that’s why I’m glad that you noticed that. And in terms of the cutting room floor. Yes. So my toxic trait as a writer, is I overwrite, I overwrite everything, and my column is like, has to be about 850. Well, they let me go up to about 890, but it’s pushing it a bit. But every week I write 1000 words and I have to cut them out. This book I handed in 120,000 words, we have to get it down to 90. I always overwrite every script there. Everything I know about lots of TV series, I was meant to handle maximum 45 I’d hand in at I just, I just can’t I just can’t be concise. So there’s loads that we had to cut. The one thing that I’m really sad that we had to cut is there was a whole chapter where Andy went up to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which is like the biggest Comedy Festival in the UK and maybe even one of the biggest in the world. Although he goes there, not as a performer because he doesn’t take shows to the fringe anymore, because he wasn’t making enough money from it. So he goes there as a punter, he goes there as just a person. And he has to watch all his peer group, do all their shows, and everyone’s asking him about like his show. And he’s just there, sort of like the guy going back to the office who doesn’t work at that office anymore. And there was like, it was such a specific thing. And I had a long conversation with a comedian about what that specific summer at the Edinburgh Fringe feels like. And he was that we talked about how strange it is. So I really liked that section. And I And I’ve spent three summers as a unfortunately, performer, in inverted commas in musicals, in my late teens and early 20s. So I’ve always wanted to write about what those summers at the fringe are like, but something gotta go. So we had to get rid.

I feel like there’s just like this alternate universe out there of all these, like little scenes and vignettes of these characters. But I always like to imagine because I like to think of, you know, all the things in between when I’m reading, I’m like, you know, I know that these characters are out there doing other things. And but at the same time, I think all the pieces that are that did make it in are like, the exact right number of things, and the exact right moments of things that go through. Because, yeah, it really feels accurate to that time to that time in your life, when you’re like, Oh, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and everyday is so long. And yet, all of a sudden, you look and you’re like how is it already been three months or six months?

Actually, thank you for saying that. I mean, the thing that I really learned from making TV show and I really didn’t want to learn this, but unfortunately I did is it’s just always good to catch up. It’s just like, the more uncomfortable you feel about cutting, the better. It’s just it’s you always have to cut more than you think. And I have a folder on my laptop that goes back through memoir from columns that will last from film scripts that never went anywhere, cut scenes in books and in scripts called off cuts. And it’s just all of it’s in there. It’s just this like weird freezer full of like half eaten food that I would think one day I’ll return to.

In 15-20 years, you put that out as like the you know, the Dolly Alderton b sides as you like here, everything that I cut from somewhere else, wade through it, what you will.

What a weird book that would be.

I think people would love it. Thank you. I have to say to you talking a little bit about you know, adapting everything I know about love for TV. Yeah, and there is a great audio book of good material with Arthur Darvill and Vanessa Kirby reading. But I wonder did you have like celebrities in mind when you were writing? Do you like put faces to your characters? Or you’re like, I can’t do that. That messes me up.

It messes me off a bit. So I don’t do that. Because also the thing that’s like casting is such a fun part of the process that when I’ve had meetings with production companies about the potential adaptation, good material, they’ve thrown names at me for r&d, that I’m like, what their hat, I would never have seen that guy as Andy, and then it makes you think, and then you suddenly see, that’s the joy of writing something and then putting it out in the world is that it just takes on this whole new life. And you can see it through all these other different perspectives. And so I liked the brainstorm of other people thinking about about which actors they imagine attached to it. I mean, in terms of So Vanessa Kirby is a friend of mine, when I was thinking about the audiobook for Jen, and who I wanted, obviously, it doesn’t matter what the character looks like, there’s kind of the right voice in audio. But I was thinking about who I saw for Jen. And I was like, Oh, my God, I have totally written apart for Vanessa Kirby, I hadn’t even realized, but I was like, everything. Like the voice is right. She looks exactly like Jen. And maybe that was in the back of my head when I was writing it. Well, I didn’t know I mean, I’m much more likely when I’m writing characters to their faces to be an amalgamation of people I’ve met. So I wonder if Jen there was Vanessa’s face somewhere there and back of my head, but she’s done a beautiful job. And it’s

But I mean, I was reading and listening because I like to get the full experience and hear a top tier experience.

Thank you.

I know it’s not going to be the off cuts, b sides, but is there anything that you’re working on next that you’re very excited about?

Yeah, I’m taking I’m not writing a book this year. So I’m taking it as a TV and film. Yeah. So I’ve just got a load of scripts that I’m working on at the moment at various different stages. And I’m doing big American trip next month and for all of March to do the launch of Good Material there which I am so excited about going into LA for the first time in my life, so I’ve obviously just been listening to like Ladies of the Canyon over and over again and imagining all I’m seeing myself is Laurel Canyon in the 1970s. Like I’m not engaging at all with all the rest of La it’s like it’s just going to floating around barefoot in their caftan doing Joni Mitchell cosplay.

I think that’ll go really well. You just you just put blinders on to everything else you’re like, This is the experience I’m having for myself.

Although I was reading up about Laurel Canyon today, and I read this thing that I just wish I could remove from my brain because I know it’s gonna like ruin my whole trip where it’s like, trivia about Laurel Canyon. It’s like Father John Misty, you know, that incredible way to and he’s also very beautiful. Father John Misty wrote the song I can’t remember what the song over something about meeting you at the store, based on the fact that he met his wife in the parking lot of the Laurel Canyon Country Store. So I have obviously this afternoon when I’ve had so much work to do, instead of doing the work I’ve just been like, on Google image, looking at pictures of the shop in Laurel Canyon, imagining all the folk musicians who I’m going to meet and fall in love with in the aisles, buying my cereal.

I mean, what else could you possibly spend time doing? That seems really important to me. I don’t know. But it’s sometimes you have to just, if the harder you try to push it out, the more you’ll think about it. So you just have to…

I know, you’re so right. It was when I was on the Google reviews of the shop. I am wasting time.

Yeah, you’re like zooming in on other people’s pictures they’ve posted you’re like I gotta get out of here. Well, I am so excited for the American launch of Good Material. It’s going to be so amazing. People are going to love it, I can already tell. And they should pick up your back list. Everything I Know About Love Ghosts, Dear Dolly, there’s so many good things for people to learn about you and your writing before they get a chance to pick up Good Material. So thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you, I’ve completely loved this conversation. And I’m also so grateful to Barnes and Noble for the support and the celebration that they have very generously showed the book and me so thank you so much.

Thank you so much