Dolly Alderton – Everything I Know about Love: Book Review & Audio Summary

Book Info

• Book name: Everything I Know About Love
• Author: Dolly Alderton
• Genre: Biographies & Memoirs, Self-Help & Personal Development
• Pages: 416
• Published Year: 2018
• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Language: English
• Awards: Shortlisted for the 2018 British Book Awards in the Non-Fiction Book of the Year category

Audio Summary

Synopsis

Everything I Know About Love is Dolly Alderton’s unflinchingly honest memoir about navigating your twenties in London. From getting kicked out of Camden clubs to taking a drunken £200 taxi ride to see a crush 100 miles away, Alderton chronicles the messy, exhilarating chaos of early adulthood. Through a series of unsuitable boyfriends, precarious freelance jobs, and countless hangovers, she discovers that the wild romance she was chasing wasn’t where she expected to find it. Instead, the deepest love story of her twenties was with her female friendships. With humor, vulnerability, and razor-sharp observations, Alderton transforms her personal disasters into universal truths about self-confidence, heartbreak, and what truly makes life meaningful.

Key Takeaways

• Female friendships can be the most profound and enduring love stories of your life, often more significant than romantic relationships
• Your twenties are supposed to be messy—the chaos, mistakes, and misadventures are teaching you essential lessons about who you are
• The gap between who you imagined you’d be and who you actually are isn’t failure; it’s the space where real growth happens
• Self-discovery doesn’t come from wild adventures alone, but from the quiet moments of reflection that follow them
• Growing up doesn’t mean abandoning fun or spontaneity; it means learning which experiences truly serve you

My Summary

When Your Life Becomes the Story You Didn’t Expect

I’ll be honest—when I first picked up Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love, I expected another millennial memoir about dating apps and brunch culture. What I got instead was something far more raw, relatable, and surprisingly profound. This book hit me like that 3 AM conversation with your best friend where you finally admit the truths you’ve been avoiding.

The opening scene sets the tone perfectly: a drunk Dolly stumbling into a minicab office in North London at 2 AM, demanding a ride to Leamington Spa—nearly 100 miles away—to see a university crush. The cabbies laugh, thinking she’s joking. She’s not. She pays £100 upfront and convinces her crush Will to pay the rest when she arrives at 5 AM. They smoke weed, fool around, and pass out until 3 PM. She wakes up to dozens of worried texts and a bank account in serious overdraft.

This isn’t just a funny anecdote about youthful recklessness. It’s a perfect encapsulation of what Alderton’s twenties were about: chasing stories, seeking adventures, and believing that anything worth doing was worth doing to excess. As someone who once drove four hours to see a band I barely liked just because a girl I had a crush on mentioned she’d be there, I felt this in my bones.

The Romance That Was Hiding in Plain Sight

What makes Everything I Know About Love stand out from other memoirs about messy twenties is Alderton’s eventual realization about where the real love story was all along. She spent years chasing unsuitable men—the emotionally unavailable ones, the eccentric ones, the ones who were clearly wrong for her but made for good stories. There was Harry, her university boyfriend whose passion for lacrosse and maintaining a stiff upper lip couldn’t match her desire for emotional depth and connection.

But while she was fixating on romantic failures, she was living out the greatest love story of her life: her friendships with women, particularly her best friend Farly. These weren’t just casual friendships or convenient companionships. They were intense, all-consuming relationships that shaped who she became. They were the people who booked her a deliberately long bus ticket home after the Leamington Spa incident, hoping she’d reflect on her choices (spoiler: she made friends with a hen party and did tequila shots the whole way home instead).

This reframing of what “love” means resonated deeply with me. In a culture obsessed with finding “the one,” Alderton reminds us that some of our most significant relationships aren’t romantic at all. The friends who see you at your worst, who call you out when you need it, who show up at 3 AM—those are love stories too. Maybe the most important ones.

The Architecture of Female Friendship

Alderton doesn’t romanticize female friendship into some sanitized, supportive sisterhood. Her friendships are messy, complicated, sometimes competitive, occasionally painful. There are jealousies when one friend gets a serious boyfriend and suddenly has less time. There are moments of feeling left behind as friends pair off, get engaged, start thinking about mortgages and babies while you’re still figuring out how to pay rent.

But there’s also profound intimacy—the kind where you can call someone at any hour, where you develop your own language and inside jokes, where you know each other’s patterns and triggers better than any romantic partner ever could. Alderton captures this duality beautifully, showing how these friendships evolve and deepen even as they’re tested by the inevitable changes that come with growing up.

Research actually backs this up. A 2010 study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology found that women with breast cancer who had close friendships were more likely to survive than those without strong social connections. Another study from Michigan State University in 2017 found that friendships become increasingly important to health and happiness as we age, sometimes even more so than family relationships.

The Gap Between Expectation and Reality

One of the most powerful threads running through Everything I Know About Love is the tension between the life Alderton imagined for herself and the life she was actually living. As a suburban schoolgirl, she dreamed of an adulthood filled with glamour, romance, wild adventures, and career success. She pictured herself as a sophisticated woman with a fabulous job, a gorgeous boyfriend, and an enviable social life.

The reality was considerably messier. She worked a string of unsatisfying jobs, lived as a precarious freelancer constantly in her overdraft, dated a parade of unsuitable men, and spent more mornings hungover than she’d like to admit. On paper, her early twenties might have looked like a series of mistakes and missteps. But Alderton argues—and I think she’s right—that this gap between expectation and reality is where the real growth happens.

This resonates with contemporary research on the “quarter-life crisis.” A 2011 study by psychologist Oliver Robinson found that this period of uncertainty and instability in your twenties, while uncomfortable, often leads to significant personal growth and better life satisfaction later on. The key is reframing these experiences not as failures but as necessary explorations.

When “Anything for a Good Story” Becomes a Problem

Alderton and her university friends lived by an unspoken motto: anything for a good story. Hangovers, heartbreak, financial irresponsibility—all were acceptable as long as they resulted in a funny anecdote to share later. This philosophy fueled countless adventures and created memories that would last a lifetime.

But as Alderton gradually realizes, living solely for stories can become exhausting and ultimately hollow. There’s a difference between collecting experiences and actually experiencing your life. When you’re always thinking about how something will sound when you tell it later, you’re not fully present in the moment. You’re performing your life rather than living it.

This is something I’ve struggled with personally, especially in the age of Instagram and social media. How many times have we chosen to do something not because we actually wanted to, but because we knew it would make a good post? Alderton’s memoir predates peak Instagram culture, but her insights feel even more relevant now.

The turning point comes when Alderton starts to see her friends “calming down”—getting serious about careers, falling in love, thinking about things like kitchen tiles and couples holidays. Initially, she resists this change, doubling down on her pursuit of wild escapades. But eventually, she realizes her friends aren’t giving up on fun or adventure; they’re just becoming more selective about which experiences truly serve them.

Practical Wisdom Hidden in the Chaos

Despite being a memoir rather than a prescriptive self-help book, Everything I Know About Love is packed with practical wisdom about navigating your twenties and beyond. Here are some of the most valuable lessons I took away:

1. Your Bank Account Will Recover, But Your Relationships Won’t Always

Alderton spent years in her overdraft, making financially questionable decisions like £200 taxi rides to see crushes. While she doesn’t recommend this approach, she notes that money problems in your twenties are usually temporary. You can rebuild your finances. But relationships—especially friendships—require consistent attention and care. Neglect them for too long, and they might not be there when you finally have time for them.

This has changed how I prioritize my time. When a friend reaches out for coffee and I’m busy with work, I remember that the work will always be there, but the friendship requires tending now.

2. Dating the Wrong People Teaches You What You Actually Need

Alderton’s roster of unsuitable boyfriends might seem like wasted time, but each relationship taught her something about what she truly valued. The emotionally unavailable ones taught her she needed someone willing to be vulnerable. The eccentric ones showed her the difference between interesting and compatible. The ones who didn’t appreciate her taught her to recognize her own worth.

This reframes “failed” relationships as valuable learning experiences rather than time wasted. Every wrong person brings you closer to understanding what right looks like—not just in a partner, but in how you show up in relationships yourself.

3. Self-Reflection Requires Stillness, Not Just More Experiences

When Sophie deliberately booked Dolly the longest possible bus journey home from Leamington Spa, hoping she’d reflect on her choices, Dolly instead made friends with a hen party and did tequila shots the whole way. This perfectly captures how we often avoid the very reflection that would help us grow.

Alderton eventually learned that accumulating experiences without processing them is like reading books without remembering anything. The growth doesn’t come from the experience itself, but from the reflection that follows. This is why she wrote the memoir—to finally sit with all those stories and understand what they meant.

In our current culture of constant stimulation and endless content, this lesson feels crucial. We need space to process, to sit with discomfort, to actually think about what we’re learning. That might mean putting your phone away on the bus ride home, even if there’s a hen party offering tequila shots.

4. Growing Up Doesn’t Mean Becoming Boring

One of Alderton’s biggest fears was that growing up meant becoming boring—trading spontaneity for stability, adventure for responsibility, fun for maturity. But what she discovers is that maturity isn’t about eliminating joy from your life; it’s about becoming more intentional about where you find it.

You can still have adventures in your thirties, forties, and beyond. But maybe you don’t need to get kicked out of clubs in Camden to feel alive. Maybe the adventure is finally writing that book, or traveling somewhere meaningful, or having the courage to be vulnerable in a relationship. Growing up means expanding your definition of what makes life rich, not narrowing it.

5. The Story You’re Living Makes Sense Only in Retrospect

While she was living through her chaotic early twenties, Alderton couldn’t see the narrative arc. She was just stumbling from one experience to the next, collecting fragments and anecdotes. Only later, with distance and reflection, could she see how all those pieces fit together into a coherent story about friendship, self-discovery, and learning what truly matters.

This is both comforting and challenging. It’s comforting because it means the confusion you’re feeling right now might make perfect sense in five years. It’s challenging because it requires trusting the process even when you can’t see where it’s leading.

Where the Book Falls Short

As much as I loved Everything I Know About Love, it’s not without limitations. The most significant is one that Alderton herself would probably acknowledge: this is a very specific experience of being young in London in the 2010s, coming from a relatively privileged background. Not everyone has the safety net that allows for £200 taxi rides and constant overdrafts without serious consequences.

Some readers have criticized the book for being too focused on Alderton’s personal experiences, making it feel more like a memoir than a book offering universal lessons. And they’re not wrong—this is very much Alderton’s story. But I’d argue that’s also its strength. The specificity is what makes it feel authentic. She’s not claiming to speak for everyone; she’s just honestly sharing what she learned.

The book also focuses heavily on drinking culture and partying, which might not resonate with readers who didn’t have that experience in their twenties, whether by choice or circumstance. If you spent your early twenties caring for family members, working multiple jobs to make ends meet, or dealing with serious health issues, some of Alderton’s adventures might feel tone-deaf or inaccessible.

Additionally, while Alderton does eventually reflect on her choices, some readers might wish for more critical examination of behaviors like excessive drinking or financial irresponsibility. She’s honest about the consequences, but she doesn’t necessarily condemn the choices that led to them.

How It Compares to Other Millennial Memoirs

Everything I Know About Love sits in a crowded field of memoirs about messy young adulthood. Compared to Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl, Alderton’s book feels less focused on being provocative and more interested in genuine vulnerability. Where Dunham often seems to be performing her neuroses, Alderton feels like she’s actually working through them.

It shares DNA with Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love in its journey-toward-self-discovery narrative, but Alderton’s journey is less about dramatic transformation and more about gradual realization. She doesn’t hike the Pacific Crest Trail or travel to exotic locations; she just slowly figures out what matters while living her regular life in London.

The closest comparison might be to Nora Ephron’s essay collections, which similarly blend humor, heartbreak, and hard-won wisdom about relationships and growing up. Like Ephron, Alderton has a gift for finding universal truths in specific personal experiences and for making even painful moments feel somehow life-affirming.

Who This Book Is Really For

If you’re in your twenties and feeling like you’re not where you “should” be, this book will feel like a permission slip to be messy while you figure things out. If you’re in your thirties or beyond, it will make you nostalgic for that chaotic period while also grateful you survived it.

This book is for anyone who has ever taken a ridiculously expensive taxi to see someone who probably wasn’t worth it. It’s for people who have looked around at their friends settling down and wondered if something’s wrong with them for not being ready. It’s for anyone who has ever prioritized a good story over good sense.

But more than anything, it’s for people who understand that the deepest love stories aren’t always romantic. If you’ve ever had a friendship that shaped who you are, that survived distance and life changes and the inevitable growing pains of becoming adults, you’ll see yourself in these pages.

Final Thoughts: The Love Story We All Need

What I keep coming back to with Everything I Know About Love is how it reframes what we consider important. In a culture obsessed with romantic relationships as the ultimate goal, Alderton offers a different narrative: maybe the most important relationships in your life are the ones you build with friends, with yourself, with the gradual process of becoming who you’re meant to be.

The book doesn’t offer easy answers or a roadmap for navigating your twenties. Instead, it offers something more valuable: the reassurance that confusion, mistakes, and detours are part of the journey, not obstacles to it. Your life doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s. The gap between who you imagined you’d be and who you actually are isn’t a failure—it’s where the interesting stuff happens.

Reading this book made me think differently about my own messy twenties, about the friendships I’ve sometimes taken for granted, about the ways I’m still learning what love actually means. It reminded me that the best stories aren’t always the ones we set out to tell; sometimes they’re the ones we discover we’ve been living all along.

Have you read Everything I Know About Love? What did you think about Alderton’s take on friendship versus romance? And more broadly, what do you wish you’d known about love when you were younger? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.