Not everyone gets to have everything in life and that’s okay
AGONY AUNT, PODCAST SENSATION AND AUTHOR DOLLY ALDERTON TALKS TO HANNAH STEPHENSON ABOUT LOVE, LONELINESS AND ‘GHOSTING’ IN THE WORLD OF DATING TODAY
BESTSELLING author, journalist and podcaster Dolly Alderton, once described as a ‘Nora Ephron for the millennial generation’, knows more than most about love life dilemmas.
The former dating columnist wrote candidly about her ‘roaring 20s’ when she immersed herself in booze, sex and complicated relationships with men, in her hit memoir Everything I Know About Love, and has just taken on a Dear Dolly agony column in the Sunday Times at the age of 32, which she describes as her dream job.
“All I’ve ever really wanted to do is an agony aunt column,” she enthuses. “I’m very interested in other people’s lives, I’m quite nosy. I’ve made lots of questionable decisions which has armed me, not to be an expert but definitely to share things that I’ve learned.”
Women write to the agony aunt predominantly about love and loneliness, she explains.
“The themes are always the same – ‘I’m worried I’m going to be alone forever, I’m desperately lonely’.”
Dolly, a former story producer for Made In Chelsea, doesn’t fear loneliness herself, she says.
“I’m very lucky. I’ve got a wonderful group of friends and I love the city I live in and the main thing is that I’ve been in a relationship with my work for 15 years. So far, it’s really loved me back. It’s been a very fulfilling thing in my life.”
She’s now penned her first novel, Ghosts, a brilliantly written story about millennials in the modern world as they navigate the paths of online dating, diverging friendships and ageing parents.
It centres on Nina, a 32-year-old food writer who is blissfully happy with new boyfriend Max, who she met on a dating site but who then ghosts her (stops responding to any texts or communications).
“I wanted to write about modern heterosexuality and I thought, what’s the most haunting, confusing and intriguing of modern day things – and it’s ghosting. It’s happened to every woman I know. Within an hour I had the entire plot mapped out.”
Dolly herself has been a victim of ghosting, she reveals.
“It wasn’t a recent thing, but I’ve been single for most of my life so it is something I’m familiar with. It felt like it was something that people are very fearful of when they date.
“Ghosting takes over your whole life and brain, it occupies your friendship group for a while, as you think, ‘What happened? Where did he go? Has he died?’ It’s an obvious narrative device for a storyteller because it’s mysterious.”
There are clear similarities between the author and her heroin, Nina. They are both writers, they both live in north London, they are both the same age.
“But Nina is very different to me. She’s very unsentimental, very logical, very cynical and black and white.
“Her life is different to mine. She spent all her 20s in a long-term relationship, I haven’t had a longterm relationship since my early 20s. She’s a straight-edged person, I’m a bit chaotic. But we do share a sense of humour and find the same things funny.”
The story is interwoven with the female friendships that Nina sustains, as she finds herself distanced from her best friend who is completely absorbed by motherhood and marriage, reflects on her relationship with her ex-boyfriend who is now a friend and, most poignantly, sees her beloved father descend into dementia.
But there is much light too, including the sanctity of friendship with her pal Lola, still single and hopeful.
“Nina and Lola are still looking for love. They are yin and yang. Lola is big-hearted, romantic and hopeful, and believes against all odds that she is going to have her great love story.
“Nina is someone who has an innate craving to have a family unit like the one she grew up in, but she’s also aware of how it limits women and how unfair those domestic and romantic structures can be on the woman,” she muses.
Is that how Dolly views life?
“You can’t grow up watching the things I’ve been exposed to without feeling complicated about longing to be in a relationship, maybe a marriage, having children and loving men.
“It doesn’t mean that I have any contempt towards men but being a heterosexual woman is a complex thing.”
While she is done with online dating, at least for now, Dolly readily admits she would like to meet someone.
“I’m a great romantic, so I’m very open to it in my future, but it’s not something that’s occupying the top of my list at the moment.
“We are fed by our 1980s mothers that we can have everything we want,” she continues. “There’s this fallacy that you can control your romantic and familial destiny. The fact is, not everyone in life gets everything, and that’s okay. The more comfortable you can get with that truth, the better.
“I would love to have a family and be in a long-term relationship, but what I want even more is to write novels and make a career out of my writing for the rest of my life. The rest of it, you just have to be hopeful and open-minded and see what happens.”
Her 30s are very different from her 20s, she agrees.
“They are emotionally easier in that I feel like I want to minimise drama and conflict and unnecessary stress and upset as much as possible. I have a greater sense of peace in who I am and what matters and what I believe and who my friends are and how I want to conduct myself.
“But practically it is way, way harder when dramatic life stuff starts to happen in your 30s. It’s a life cycle, it’s life shoved in your face. People’s parents are dying or getting ill, people of our age are having health scares, are struggling to have babies or falling apart when they’ve had babies. It’s big, serious stuff.”
She’s been single for a long time and, like her fictional heroine, she does think about the biological clock, she admits.
“It’s not something most women need to be reminded of. The world has been built very strategically to make sure women don’t forget that fact. From the age of about 30 onwards, whether it’s advertising or nagging conversations with your mother, it’s not something that’s ever going to slip your mind.
“Of course it’s a background noise that is ever present and the volume increases and decreases. But it’s not something that preoccupies me in any all-encompassing way.”
That’s not surprising considering Dolly’s hectic work schedule. She hosts the hugely successful podcast The High Low with her writer pal Pandora Sykes, which has been running for nearly four years, in which they talk about the week’s headlines, gossip and zeitgeist topics with millennial aplomb. It gets more than a million downloads a month.
It was inspired by Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown, who coined the term ‘high low journalism’ in the 80s to denote an amalgamation of watercooler gossip and hard-hitting cultural happenings.
Piers Morgan deemed the pair “braying posh girls talking gibberish” – they both went to private school, Dolly to Rugby, after which she read English and drama at Exeter. But they are having the last laugh.
“It’s like a big business now, which we never anticipated,” Dolly reflects.
She has several scripts in development including the adaptation of Everything I Know About Love, but she says she won’t be writing any more autobiographies.
“The desire has gone. The place where I feel most enjoyment and fulfilment is in fiction now,” she says.
Ghosts by Dolly Alderton is published by Fig Tree, priced £14.99. Available now
FILMING new adventure show Don’t Rock The Boat made I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! feel like a holiday. That’s the verdict of singer/ songwriter Fleur East. She went into the jungle in 2018, and is also one of 12 famous faces who recently rowed the entire length of Britain – all in the name of television.
“I have never seen so many people break all at once,” recalls the London-born star, 32, describing her experience of making Don’t Rock The Boat. “Every single person that took part in this reached their breaking point.”
Airing across five consecutive nights on ITV, the epic series is presented by Top Gear’s Freddie Flintoff and The Voice’s AJ Odudu.
We will see them help guide the two teams of rowers as they are pushed to their physical and mental limits over the 500 miles from John O’Groats to Lands End. And guess what? There are gruelling challenges on-shore too.
Joining Fleur in the red team is supermodel and broadcaster Jodie Kidd, Olympic, World and European cycling champion Victoria Pendleton CBE, politician and author Tom Watson, and actors Craig Charles and Adam Thomas. The opposing blue team consists of The Chase’s Dark Destroyer Shaun Wallace, Pussycat Doll Kimberly Wyatt, YouTuber Joe Weller, ex-Corrie actress Lucy Fallon, sports presenter and Olympian Denise Lewis OBE and Love Island winner Jack Fincham.
Here, Fleur, Denise and Adam tell us more about the “terrifying” competition.
UNFORGETTABLE EXPERIENCE
ROUGH seas, sleeping on the boat, a bucket for a toilet: it’s fair to say none of the celebrities knew quite what they were getting themselves into when they signed up to Don’t Rock The Boat.
“I like to think I’m quite a tough character,” notes 48-year-old Denise, who was born in West Bromwich and won gold in the heptathlon at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
“I thought I’d seen it all. And there were moments when I thought, ‘This is not right, we shouldn’t be going through this’.
“But there was just something, about that camaraderie, about that need to keep digging deep that just didn’t let you quit.”
Within the teams, they split up into pairs, taking in turns to row for a couple of hours at a time – including through the night.
“When you’re rowing at 2am, rowing into nothing, into just blackness, your oars in the air... Honestly, there were moments when we thought we were going to die, moments when your dignity was just completely out of the window,” reflects Fleur, who was runner-up in the 11th series of The X Factor, back in 2014.
“Sitting on a bucket, in the middle of the ocean...
“It was humiliating at times and really testing. But honestly, the most rewarding thing ever at the same time.”
UNCOMFORTABLE DIGS
DURING the nights they were rowing, they would stop to sleep for a couple of hours.
But “when we say sleeping, the cabin was literally like the length of your body, and you had to be sleeping in there with your rowing partner, so you got to know each other pretty well, very quickly,” says Fleur, chuckling.
“It was really tough, it was like sleeping in a little coffin,” adds Mancunian Adam, 32, who’s known for roles in Emmerdale and Waterloo Road.
“And because of the sea as well, and the rocking and everything, it was so claustrophobic.”
“You’ve reminded me about the cabin... It took a while for me to go in there,” Denise jumps in. “I do have a little bit of claustrophobia and the smell in there – it wasn’t the best!”
PHYSICAL TOLL
ASKED about the impact the challenge had on their bodies, Fleur exclaims: “Oh my god – blisters! We had bruises, we had muscles that were just so tight, we literally had to just stretch out constantly.”
They were all given a rowing machine before filming to use for training, but Fleur scoffs this was “pointless”.
“It’s completely different to when you’re in the boat. Action, discipline, everything. All that training just went out of the window and we were basically starting from square one.
“But there were moments where it was absolutely incredible, to see the sky at night, all the stars. We saw meteor showers, we saw Saturn, Jupiter, Mars – so bright.
“Honestly you can’t get that anywhere else or doing anything else. Those moments made it worthwhile. It was magical seeing that.”
“You should have been focusing on rowing!” quips competitive Denise, which sets them all off laughing.
ONES TO WATCH
THE big question is, did anyone in their teams surprise them by really stepping up to the challenge?
“Tom Watson, who I thought was completely out of his depth, he was amazing!” enthuses Fleur.
“He had such a good stroke and his tenacity was unreal, he just never gave up.”
“I thought Lucy was going to be a bit light, I have to be honest,” confides Denise.
“I thought she was going to be a bit flaky and I saw that girl just go to places that you just don’t want to go to and survive and keep coming back... that was a big moment for me to witness.”
Being in such a confined environment during filming, and with so many big personalities, you’d predict there’d be some clashes – and Fleur confirms this was true.
“We had to do a lot of mediating, which you’ll see,” she teases.
“But, actually, after we had those little tiffs, we got closer.”
FIERCE RIVALRY
THERE are lots of jokes throughout the chat about how Denise didn’t hide how badly she wanted to be on the winning team.
And Adam confirms that it did get “really competitive at times, which I didn’t see coming.
“I just thought, we’re all going to be friends, we’re all going to get on, but as soon as we were separated into two teams, that’s where the journey really began.”
“You know, the show was sold as a competition,” reasons Denise.
“It wasn’t a pleasure boat thing, it wasn’t a sightseeing expedition, it was a competition and so that literally just sparks the Olympian again.
“It’s about trying to get to the destination as quickly as possible, and yeah, once we had our colours, that was it. Game on!”
Don’t Rock The Boat starts on ITV on Monday at 9pm