Dolly Alderton

Emma Cox talks to Dolly Alderton ahead of Everything I Know About Love's debut on the BBC. Big RT Interview: Dolly Alderton (GETTY).

I think it’s been a wonderful thing for the world, and we just need to work out how to use it safely.” I know that man exists, you just have to take a bit of time finding him.” Particularly as a woman, it can feel very polarised and can really destabilise a person’s sense of self. As a millennial, Alderton was part of the first generation who used the internet to open up about their insecurities, sex lives, anxieties, drug-taking and heartbreaks. “I wanted to be in the great canon of memoirists like Nora Ephron or Dorothy Parker. I wanted to be a woman who documented her real life, shaped it into a story and shared it with people. “Lots of details in the book changed, particularly about the men, because I didn’t want to get sued! One has to wonder how Farly and her other friends feel about Dolly’s sometimes painful honesty about their life, especially as a primetime BBC show will bring those stories to a whole new audience. I remember so clearly that front cover with the woman smoking a fag and thinking it was the most impossibly glamorous thing in the world.” He had previously turned Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary into three hit films, and has spent the past three years working with Alderton and the BBC to develop a scripted version of her book. “It’s a journey Eric’s done before with Helen,” explains Alderton. “She was writing columns as well, so he was interested in new young female voices. It didn’t feel like a huge sacrifice for me at the time at all.” Now she’s four years older and admits to feeling embarrassed at how much she shared, not just in the book but in the blogs and newspaper dating columns that predated it.

This riotous show based on Dolly Alderton's memoir about her 20s is full of great nights out, dire men and depleted bank accounts. It's no Sex and the City, ...

The emotional heart of the series lies in Maggie learning to navigate life more independently when the perpetually-single Birdy finally gets a boyfriend and is not constantly available to her any more. Is the fact that we have seen none of these supposed characteristics in Birdy hitherto a sign in favour of the latter, or a simple failure of writing so far? In Alderton and Appleton’s hands, Maggie is just charming and unaffected enough to make you give her the benefit of the doubt. Maggie (the author’s avatar, played by Emma Appleton) is 24 and has just arrived in London. She is one of four friends sharing an unfeasibly spacious and unsqualid house, which feels like an odd choice for a series so keen to perpetuate the relatability that made the book such a hit. Rounding out the London houseshare – sometimes with karaoke but, as I say, they are young and must be forgiven – are Maggie’s university friends Nell (Marli Siu) and Amara (Aliyah Odoffin). But, it is Birdy and Maggie, whose blossoming friendship we see in flashbacks to their school days, who are each other’s ride-or-dies. Alderton has now adapted her account of those black-edged golden years into a BBC One drama series of the same name.

As Everything I Know About Love hits our screens, Dolly Alderton is dropping some home truths about love in the modern age. Get her brilliant take on the ...

And they’re the relationships that have changed me the most.” “They’re the relationships I have the most confidence in. As Everything I Know About Love makes very clear, Dolly Alderton doesn’t pretend to know everything about love. “I feel lucky to be a millennial that dated before apps,” she said. In that time, she’s seen first-hand how love has changed for the worse for millennials, and she just summed up why perfectly. The new BBC adaptation of Dolly Alderton’s memoir Everything I Know About Love is finally here.

New BBC comedy-drama Everything I Know About Love is based on the 2018 memoir by the journalist Dolly Alderton. While many of us twentysomethings would struggle ...

Commissioned by the BBC and starring Bel Powley, Emma Appleton, Marli Siu, and Aliyah Odoffi, the series is described as “a raucous girl gang show.” Like the ...

Speaking to Woman’s Hour on the eve of the premiere, Alderton said, “I would describe it as a romantic comedy drama about two best friends, so it’s the love story of two best female friends told with the same lens as you would tell a traditional romantic comedy between men and women.” Although nothing has officially been confirmed yet, Alderton told Bustle she is eager to work on more television and would love to return to Everything I Know About Love. “I would love there to be a season two,” she said. When asked by Time Out whether she had ambitions to do more TV, she confirmed that she has “ dreams rather than plans at the moment.” Alderton also told Woman’s Hour that she has another novel in the works: “ I’m going to write a novel next because yeah, I do kind of fancy sitting on my own at a desk for six hours a day, just for a few months.