I know women who have used Dolly Alderton’s 2018 memoir Everything I Know About Love as a manual for their twenties, revising their life goals in accordance with its core message: that we can learn most about love from our friendships, rather than from romantic relationships. Every time one of my friends is dumped, I sent them a screenshot of a paragraph from one of Alderton’s Sunday Times Style columns. And I went to therapy for the first time after reading the chapter in Everything I Know About Love titled “My Therapist Says”. So I expected that the BBC One drama based on the book – adapted by Alderton herself – couldn’t possibly match the original’s knack for capturing the experience of millennial women.
And yet the Everything I Know About Love screenplay gets those mid-twenties years right. The show provides a chance to look back fondly at a more feral stage of life, as I turn 28 and, one by one, my friends settle down. There’s so much that is familiar – the landlord who resists bringing in a dehumidifier for the damp, the situationships with men whose sexual desires seem to be founded entirely on pornography. The sheer, chaotic energy of the protagonist popping MDMA in Camden while wearing a sequinned dress is particularly nostalgia-inducing in an era of clean-eating, beige-wearing Gen Z.
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