Let’s not call it “breaking America”, exactly. But British author Dolly Alderton has just finished her first US book tour, which meant travelling to New York and Washington, and appearing on The Today Show. After that, she spent a month living in LA, taking meetings and drinking “something called a moon juice, which has nectar pollen sprinkled on it, for breakfast.” Then there was a very West Coast encounter with the supernatural: “I’m afraid to say that I did go see a witch. There was whispering into herbs. There were spells. There were cats running around. There was a circle drawn around me in a red rope. It was the proper LA witch experience.”
All of this came about because Everything I Know About Love – the memoir you couldn’t walk down a train carriage without seeing several times in 2018 – found a second life last year on American BookTok, sending Alderton into a belated and lengthy stint on the New York Times bestseller list. It also meant her latest novel, Good Material, got a proper star-spangled launch. “It’s kind of a hack thing to say, but they really like success in America,” she says. “It was very enjoyable to not have to pretend my career has happened by accident or undercut everything with self-deprecation. That being said, after a month I was so ready to sit in a pub and talk bollocks, to have one of those conversations that’s like, ‘Who’s the fittest Tudor?’ Because I did not have those conversations in LA.”
Alderton became one of the best-known journalists of her generation thanks to her Sunday Times dating column, which in the late 2010s marked her out as a uniquely sharp-eyed chronicler of millennial relationship woes. She was relatively early to newsletters and podcasting, using them to grow a loyal fanbase of what she calls “women between the ages of 16 and 40, who have stories of heartbreak, a friend they couldn’t live without, and sometimes an interest in Taylor Swift and drinking Pinot Grigio from plastic glasses.” Those fans lapped up her 2020 debut novel, Ghosts, about a woman whose boyfriend disappears on her just as their relationship is getting serious.
But with Good Material, Alderton has changed tack. After years of telling it like it is for women, she decided to write from the perspective of a man whose relationship falls apart. Worried about messing it up, she conducted over 20 hours of interviews. “I discovered that men and women are similar in how we feel heartbreak, but on the whole, the support networks around us couldn’t be more different,” she says. “Every single man that I spoke to said they didn’t feel like they had limitless time to talk about their heartbreak with their male friends, without either compromising their dignity or it filling them with fear. But the other thing every man said is that they absolutely loved their male friends and couldn’t live without them.”
Now back in the UK, a world away from moon juice and witches, Alderton’s developing the adaptation of Good Material, working on various juicy film and TV projects she’s not allowed to talk about yet, and preparing for the small matter of a three-night residency at the Sydney Opera House in November. “I can’t believe it,” she says. “I’ve never been to Australia, but, weirdly, I have a very supportive audience there. They seem to like gobby English women.” Forget breaking America: Alderton’s going international.
See Dolly Alderton at GQ Heroes in Oxfordshire, from 3-5 July, in association with BMW UK. For more information and tickets, visit GQHeroes.com.
