Review: Good Material by Dolly Alderton

Words by Alice Patterson / Edited by Mia Stapleton

Alice Patterson reviews bestselling author Dolly Alderton’s new book, ‘Good Material,’ including in-person insights from her book tour.

Dolly Alderton does not like being called the voice of a generation – but that hasn’t stopped anybody. In her latest interview with The Sunday Times, she says she does not like people “foisting those sorts of titles on [her]” – but can you really blame them? For hordes of millennial women, Alderton encapsulated and immortalised the twenty-something experience in her debut novel Everything I Know About Love. Certainly for this writer, who fell in love with Alderton’s work before even hitting age 20, she made entering young adulthood a little less scary.  

Since then, Alderton has continued to have massive success – the High-Low podcast with Pandora Sykes, an agony aunt column in the Sunday Times – but her latest contribution veers down a different path. Good Material, her third novel, follows Andy, a 35-year-old stand-up comedian, navigating life after being inexplicably dumped by his girlfriend of three years. Forced to face a lacklustre career and life as a singleton amongst crowds of couples, Andy desperately attempts to understand where it all went wrong. 

When I heard Alderton was going on a tour to promote the book, I wasted no time in securing tickets. Hosted at The Lowry in Manchester, Alderton’s friend, stand-up comic Ivo Graham, interviewed her in a room I feel confident was almost exclusively filled by women. It was a real privilege to see Alderton chat in such a casual forum about her new release and heartbreak in general. The evening included everything from musings on male balding (what Alderton referred to as ‘the unstoppable forest fire on your head’) and the issues in dating someone outside your generation. 

There is something palpably curious about being a young fan of a writer who has moved on from books about post-university life. Watching Alderton deliver this raw exploration of the thirty-something experience is like eavesdropping on a conversation in the next room with a glass up against the wall – I’m catching every second word but can not quite make out what they are saying. It still hasn’t stopped me from flying through the book in a matter of mere days – Alderton’s rich character development leaves you, as Richard E Grant put it, “heartsore but happier.”

Good Material puts words to the seemingly indescribable frustrations and complexities of a breakup, or what protagonist Andy dubs ‘The Madness’. Alderton shouts over from the other side of the heartbreak abyss to remind us that life goes on, that we are more than our romantic relationships, and that there’s beauty to be found in solace. 

(Image Credit: ELLE)