If there is one thing that characterises Nina George Dean, the protagonist of Dolly Alderton’s debut novel, Ghosts, it’s that “she would have hated Everything I Know About Love”. “She doesn’t like female friendship being fetishised,” explains Alderton, now 32, who is sitting at one end of a large mahogany dining table in her Camden flat, an outstretched arm hovering at the window where a cigarette dangles from her hand. Nor does Nina have time for people who read memoirs by women under 30 “having feeble epiphanies about themselves”.
If this all sounds a little like self-flagellation, well, that’s not the intention. After all, Alderton’s ability to use her own experience to capture the anxieties and ambitions of her generation has made her one of Britain’s most well-known newspaper columnists and a bestselling author. Ghosts, though, is her first work of fiction and an exorcism of sorts; a chance, she says, to “murder me as a memoirist and mark a new time”.
When I arrive at her home on a warm July afternoon, Alderton has recently returned from Devon. In March, she had rented a cottage for two weeks to finish the book without distraction, but three months later she was still there. “It was strange and intense and a very odd decision on my part,” she says of spending lockdown alone, with only the sea for company. “I think I was trying to challenge myself.” Still, she came back with a completed novel and an enviable caramel tan (offset today by a louche, cornflower blue silk shirt and jeans), the result of long coastal walks.
We sit down with two large mugs of tea (and when those are finished, a bottle of crémant) in her high-ceilinged front room, which Alderton’s 260,000 followers will recognise from Instagram: the dusky-pink scalloped chairs, the enormous vintage Cary Grant poster. If you’re one of the many thousands of weekly listeners of The High Low, the cult podcast she co-hosts with her friend Pandora Sykes, you will be able to conjure her voice, too. It’s the accentless accent of the English middle class, the product, in Alderton’s case, of a stint at boarding school, something her detractors like to remind her of often. There is a slight obsession about Pandora and Dolly’s “poshness” – one listener claimed to have “evidence we were secret Tories,” says Alderton.
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People having opinions about her is something that Alderton has, if not grown used to, then come to expect. Since she started out as a freelance journalist in her early twenties – landing a dating column in The Sunday Times Style at the age of 26 (she still writes weekly for the magazine, now as an agony aunt) – Alderton has excavated her life for material. Every week for two years, she served up her tales of love and lust, which we gorged on and picked over, savouring all the messy details.
With the publication of her memoir, Everything I Know About Love, in 2018, Alderton delved further, rewinding to the highs and humiliations of her adolescence in Stanmore. She interrogated with winning and wincing honesty her complicated relationships with men, food and alcohol, and wrote about the great romances of her life: her friendships with women. Spliced with parodic emails about hen dos and baby showers, the book anointed Alderton as the unofficial doyenne of the female millennial experience; a Dorothy Parker for the social media age.
Huge success followed: to date, close to half a million copies have been sold, along with the rights to 24 countries. There was a sold-out 22-date tour (the night she played The London Palladium, the bars completely ran out of white wine). She became recognisable, stopped for selfies everywhere from Soho to Venice. It was, she says, “bananas”. And not entirely easy.
“A lot of Everything I Know was about things I found upsetting, and then for two years I had to talk about them constantly,” she says. “All those personal experiences were cashed in on, criticised and analysed.” Alderton gives herself so readily, and with such self-effacing humour, it is easy to forget that these were real and painful events in her life. Stopping therapy on the book’s publication was, she says, “a massive mistake”.
She’s careful to point out that nobody asked this of her (although I would argue that for many young women trying to carve out a career in journalism, offering up your personal traumas is sometimes the only route to a byline), and is grateful and gracious for the success and financial freedom the book has brought her. Nevertheless, she now believes “quite violently” that she can no longer “wring the flannel of my personal life out for everyone to inspect. It doesn’t make me happy.”
Of course, she still knows it is inevitable that people will ask whether Ghosts is about her – “It would be so illogical to be impatient about that.” Especially since the book hinges on the themes – modern love, relationships and friendship – Alderton made her name in. Although, be warned: this book is far more cynical about all three.
We meet Nina – a successful food writer who lives in Archway – on her 32nd birthday, at the start of “the strangest” year of her life. Her father is succumbing to dementia; she has grown apart from her best friend, who’s been sucked whole into motherhood and marriage; and is also trying to understand the dark world of dating apps, and the ease with which someone can enter your life, profess their love and then vanish, without so much as a puff of smoke to prove any of it was real.
Nora Ephron’s 1983 book Heartburn – a thinly veiled autobiography about marriage and adultery, interwoven with retro recipes – is one Alderton turns to again and again in her work (“there’s a reason Nina’s a food writer”). In Heartburn, Ephron “was exploring the most common relationship anxiety for women at the time,” she says, “which was: ‘Is my husband going to cheat on me?’ The thing I hear women talk about with fear most now is: ‘Is he going to disappear?’”
Alderton has experienced “the full spectrum”. In her dating column days, she wrote, “If you get ghosted, it’s important to confront the ghoster.” Comments left underneath the article included, “‘This woman sounds mad.’ ‘She should get the hint.’ It feeds into a larger conversation about the rules of dating that I think are so sexist, and basically say you have to be as passive as possible, because the worst thing you can be told as a woman in a romantic setting is that you’ve scared a man off. So you’re not allowed to feel anything or have any concerns or air any grievances or desires because then you will be a psycho.”
But when that is flipped, says Alderton, and it is men making declarations or plainly expressing how they feel, “They are seen as being incredibly straightforward or very romantic.”
Has she ever ghosted anyone? “No, I haven’t. I do something that I think is courteous, that other people might think is spineless.” Which is? “Just lie. If I’m not interested in someone I’m just ‘very busy with work’. What I don’t understand is the disappearing.”
Thanks to Alderton’s talent for brutally funny social observation, Ghosts is not without laughs, but it is also, by her own admission, “quite sad and realistic about the disappointments and realities of life”. But then, she’s not 26 anymore. “People are having babies, people are losing babies, you start applying for mortgages. Life gets serious. I sometimes feel cringed out when I read Everything I Know because it is so earnest and optimistic. I read that girl and her big declarations that are so absolutist about the world, and I just would love to feel how she feels.”
Having deleted Hinge in lockdown (“lots of people were having these Zoom relationships. It didn’t appeal to me”), Alderton is currently single. Has writing about her life made it harder to date? “I literally want to have a T-shirt made that says, ‘I no longer write non-fiction’, because it’s a huge problem with me meeting people.” That said, only one person has ever written to her after reading about themselves.
“This real posho called Hector sent me this long message saying, ‘Congratulations old girl, read the book and thought it was jolly good.’” The following day she went on Goodreads and saw he’d left a review. “Two stars.” Sometimes, ghosts have their good points.
Ghosts by Dolly Alderton (Fig Tree, £15) is published on 15 October.
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