This is a bad book. It is readable enough and has a fairly distinctive voice. There’s even the odd funny moment too. It also has some very annoying habits. One of which is that the book has no discernable structure other than that all the material relates to the author! As such, she takes us on a random meander through the her life ages 0-30. The first 150 pages followed a strange narrative where we seem to cover childhood - school - uni - early work life on a kind of 50 page loop. Appended to this freestyle chronology are lists, recipes and imagined invitations to weddings, baby showers, hen do’s etc. Lord only knows who thought this was a good idea; it reads like someone has spliced a 14 year old’s journal with a cookbook, a therapy diary and a dating column. It comes as no surprise to learn the author cut her literary teeth as a blogger. The book reads like a series of blogs.
The constituent parts of this dog’s dinner are probably as good a place as any to start describing what I don’t like about this book. The lists aren’t funny and mostly have a combragging element or are designed to showcase the author’s amazing taste, sexual prowess or ‘outrageous’ behaviour. The recipes are downright Nigella-level posturing. A recipe for ‘Can’t be arsed ice cream?’ is a ludicrously contradictory concept. To any normal person not trying to market themselves as a lifestyle brand, ‘can’t be arsed ice cream’ is bought in a tub from a shop or, in extreme cases, a McFlurry ordered from UberEats. ‘PISS OFF’, I shouted at the offending page when I uncovered it. To compound the problem, the author not only wants to play the lifestyle guru dispensing tips from her fabulous life but also wants to convince you that her life is totally normal and she is the quintessential everywoman. This is obviously attractive from a commercial perspective but didn’t ring true to me. The same is true of her depiction of her love life. The imagined invitations weren’t funny either. They function as marketing pieces for the aspirational lifestyle she leads - baby showers, hen nights, holidays and countryside weddings - while simultaneously attempting to mock it and thus distance herself from it. This was yet another instance of the infuriating combragging that saturates the book. The most gratuitous example of this was the mock hen do invite detailing all the woes of the overblown and expensive farce they have become. This was followed, with no detectable irony, by a description of a hen do she herself organised for her darling BFF involving renting out the whole top floor of a hotel and recording a video message from their local MP. If this sounds like the hen do she arranged is actually far more OTT and ridiculous than the one she made up in a spoof; that’s because it is!! I concluded that the author is probably the very worst example of the type of people she pretends to mock while secretly being very much in thrall to the sort of absurd socialising she claims to be so weary of!
This final trait is very much in evidence when it comes to topics like money, class or priviledge. To be fair, the author does admit to going to posh boarding school but seems to describe this as almost a sort of accident that doesn’t reflect who she really is. She inexplicably claims she doesn’t identify with posh people and defines herself as ‘feeling on the outside of their club’ (p100) when her entire life screams, ‘public school!’ like a braying Etonian after a few Pimms. How else could you explain all of her flatmates donning wellies when they discover a mouse in their house in central London? She goes to Exeter uni, works in LK Bennett, has an international life, friends in high places and exotic men to date. One of the most gratuitous examples of this is her New York trip where she arrives and finds she has no money. Any normal person would just call their parents and ask for some money but Dolly goes through many convoluted explanations to make it quite clear that she struggled through on her own. The whole book has a suspicious whiff of clandestine financial backing. The non-stop drinking at uni while not having a job, the fancy dress parties and long taxi journeys despite being apparently penniless. Money just seems to miraculously appear in her life. Or she is given a really good deal. Or has a friend who will let her use her apartment. But never a single penny from the bank of M&D. I found it all a bit disingenuous and that was my problem with the whole book. It sort of seems to say, ‘anyone can do anything with a bit of derring-do’ but in reality you can only have a life like hers when you’re rich and she should probably acknowledge this.
The book certainly purports to be open and straightforward. ‘I’m going to tell you the truth with no embellishment or spin’ might be a decent approximation of the tone. My problem is that the author’s presentation of herself is stage managed to within an inch of its life and the ‘deeper’ parts of the book feel one dimensional and prepackaged. When I found out that the author wrote a blog about ‘Made In Chelsea’ and then did some work on the show developing the characters or the plot I suddenly thought, ‘That’s it!’. The book is a literary version of ‘Made In Chelsea’. It might feel a bit like reality at first but it’s actually a scripted presentation. Are the relationships and ‘narrative arcs’ of ‘Made In Chelsea’ real? There might be an element of truth in the story, if you’re lucky, but it is shaped, adjusted and sometimes invented to pique the most interest or cause the most controversy. In the same way, I felt like this book presented itself to be a kind of ‘warts n all’ confessional but was actually a fairly serious piece of marketing. A lot of what the book is doing is identical to reality TV. The author is trying to interest you in her life and those of a small-ish cast of friends and boyfriends. You hear of their drinking antics, their sexual conquests and their heartbreaks. But do you ever hear anything about their families or hear them say anything in an unscripted and genuinely candid environment? Of course not! Both are performative and want to give the impression of reality in order to commercialise it.
As it happens, the best bit of the book was one of the ‘deeper’ parts. Her description of her experience of anorexia was well articulated and spoke with real poignancy about how often society can unwittingly reward or reinforce unhealthy and obsessive behaviour. I feel it was a shame that so much of the rest of the book was scenes from a scripted reality show. ‘Dolly has a big night out with the girls’, ‘Dolly has a one night stand’, ‘Dolly consoles a friend on the tragic loss of a family member’. I felt the last one was in pretty poor taste and I would have been hopping mad if a friend tried to write about me losing a close family member while writing absolutely nothing about her own family life. The ‘narrative arc’ that ran through the whole book was the best friend vs best friend’s boyfriend plot, which must surely have been used hundreds of times already on reality TV shows. In this sense, lots of the book’s major themes felt a bit tired, shallow and simplified for ease of consumption.
Perhaps the most annoying aspect of the book was the author’s incredibly high opinion of herself. You may say that this should be taken as a given when someone is writing a book of advice before reaching 30 but I was still taken back at the sheer scale! The first inklings come when Ms Alderton describes her experiences upon leaving the warm embraces of boarding school and Exeter Uni, which sounds like boarding school anyway: ‘I even used to get a thrill sitting in the GP’s waiting room, knowing I registered and got myself there without the help of anyone else’ (p107). Wow. Stunning. Who paid for the GP? Oh? Everyone who pays tax? Would you consider that to be the ‘help of anyone else’? There is a gag-inducingly high level of self-congratulation throughout. Such seems to be the extent of the suburban mollycoddling, the author thinks of herself as unbelievably grown up for doing pretty much anything for herself.
The ‘look at me I’m so grown up’ soon turns into a David Brent-esque screech of, ‘look at me I’M MENTAL’ when the drinking and drug taking of uni and her early twenties set in. There is a serious excess of pretty tame beer stories told in a self-satisfied way that makes it clear she obviously considers herself a world class hellraiser, which she categorically is not. Most of these ‘wild’ stories involve having a drink with middle aged men, doing a can-can or taking an expensive taxi late at night.
Another telling indication of the author’s optimistic assessment of her own chat are the absolutely groan inducing jokes. For example, “The plan is that everyone will fancy him as they get drunker and realize he’s the best of a bad bunch. A bit like how we all felt about Nick Clegg in the 2010 election” (p124) ba-BOOM! I don’t read ‘The Sunday Times Magazine’ but imagine if it’s all this good?! She also sees fit to reproduce text message conversations with her friends or random boys verbatim. A surer symptom of narcissism has not yet been discovered.
There’s also lots of com-bragging about her exes terrible behaviour and / or high social standing (PhD boffin, good looking but wild city boy, musician, entrepreneur, guru) and implied boasting about her sexual prowess. It all adds to the very definite sense throughout the book that things are being manipulated to make more engaging / aspirational / relatable content!
Another example of the sort of posturing the author indulges in relates to her intelligence. When describing the punishments for drinking at boarding school she sort of pretends to be stupid. ‘Rustication, whatever that means’ (p108), she writes dismissively so as not to appear stuffy and posh. However later on she is quite happy to talk about her love of literature and brag about her intelligence. She even uses the word ‘lugubriously’! She quite plainly is interested in words and writing so why pretend otherwise? It’s a pathetic sham.
Other parts are shameless, schmaltzy self-promotion. I would direct those looking for supporting evidence to p251 where you will find gratuitous boasting about how she is the world’s best ever mate. The vomit inducing sentimentality crescendos to a final, almighty wretch of, ‘it takes a village to mend a broken heart’. This in spite of the fact she has spent the last few pages describing how really what you need to get over a broken heart is an amazing mate like her. Just look how she was woefully abandoned by her BFF in favour of a man but, nevertheless, appears by her side, steadfast and dependable, in her hour of need.
Some of my dislike for this book must simply be my dislike for the author as she has presented herself. In my mind, she is the kind of posh girl who refuses to admit they’re posh despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. To make matters worse, as opposed to broadening her horizons after public school, she has then taken herself off to a god awful quasi-public school of a university: Exeter. It seems to be a less academic version of Durham from her descriptions; if such a horror can even be imagined! One thing the author does seem to enjoy fairly consistently is attention. Attention from men, attention from friends, attention from anyone really. Testament to this are the elaborately planned parties and abundance of fancy dress. I mean, whom, other than a bona fide attention seeker, would organise a fancy dress pub crawl to celebrate moving out of a flat? The whole book beseeches the reader to think of her as talented, entertaining, wild, interesting, funny and cool.
However, she also has a mixed relationship to her concept of coolness. She often claims not to be interested in it. A good example of this happens when she extols the virtues of living in Camden because it’s not cool only to then say the best bit about it is being able to do a drunken cancan in a bar and ‘comfortably still be the coolest people in the entire bar’ (p113). It seems perverse, and self-defeating, to claim to like living somewhere because no one cares about being cool while simultaneously claiming you’re cooler than everyone else! For me, Dolly is very obviously preoccupied with being cool. This whole book is a testimony to that fact and documentary evidence of it. Nonetheless, she is self-aware enough to realise that she must claim to be uncool or at least uninterested in the concept in order to be considered cool. The whole thing is an uneasy mixture of insecurity about being a loser and entitled belief that she’s the best thing since sliced bread.
Given that my assessment of this book has been pretty scathing, I feel like I should try to appreciate the books merits briefly before we conclude. First, this is a book by a young woman about what life is like as a young woman. This alone makes the book far less common than insufferably self-satisfied renditions of the antics of youth written by men; of which there are many! In this sense, I am, perhaps, not the target audience for this book because I am a man. In another sense, a really good book should offer something to every reader but that’s for another day. Looking at this book in the best possible light, it is an entertaining and honest look at a young, female life when an overwhelming majority of literature aimed at this demographic simply reinforces stereotypes rather than challenges them. I don’t feel like the author has been that honest or is that entertaining but that is a subjective matter and I’ve covered the reasons why at length.
As I try to think of concluding comments about this book I’m reminded of the author’s friend who tells her she must choose between being “the woman who parties harder than anyone else or the woman who works harder than anyone else” (p118). This friend obviously didn’t have a very wide social circle. Like her beer stories, and the whole book, it’s all vacuous, overblown nonsense and outlandishly self-important fantasy.
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