I first came across Dolly Alderton through The High Low, a podcast she co-hosted with Pandora Sykes. It started the same month that I made the move from Cumbria to London and it quickly became part of my commute. Over the course of its four year existence I have listened to every episode. I feel like I know Dolly. I’m aware that this relationship is entirely one-sided. She has never even heard of me, let alone my likes, dislikes and foibles but that’s the conversational and slightly voyeuristic nature of podcasts.
I listened along as she discussed the process of writing Ghosts. When it came to reading the book, it felt like it was written by a friend. There was a familiarity to it which, in the depths of our third lockdown where something as simple as going to the pub with friends evokes intense nostalgia, was both incredibly comforting and exciting. Those days will come again.
The protagonist of Ghosts is a 32 year old food writer, Nina and the novel follows her attempts to navigate her changing relationships — romantic, familial and friendly whilst deciphering the implications of these changes on her own identity. Nina’s first book is a combination of personal memoir and recipes. ‘Classic Dolly’, I thought, recognising her love of Nora Ephron and particular admiration of Heartburn with its interweaving of the personal and culinary. Nina’s views on hen-dos (an endurance exercise in organised fun, Prosecco and penis straws) and friends’ children (adorable yet frustratingly present and when not present, the subject of all conversations and excuses) were opinions I identified as Dolly’s own. I chuckled, I was in on the inside joke.
What I am most conscious of knowing about Dolly though, is that she does not believe in writing bad reviews and strongly believes that when it comes to books, a great deal of time and love on the part of the author have gone into writing them and if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Luckily, I do not have anything nasty to say about Ghosts.
The millennial pink of the spine and the subject matter could relegate this book to the genre of ‘chick-lit’. What the book actually does is emphasise the problematic, sexist nature of this term. Having a female protagonist who is dating at the age of thirty-two does not make this book trashy, it makes it relatable. Ghosts discusses the importance of female friendship, the hardship of romantic relationships and that occasionally, there is a need to sleep with someone purely because you don’t like them. Most crucially though, it delicately handles the difficult transition into a role reversal of the parent-child relationship as age shifts the duty of care onto the child.
Ghosts sometimes feels like the promotion of the wonders of female friendship needs to stand in contrast to something and the obvious enemy is men. With the exception of Nina’s heart-wrenchingly sweet father, men get a pretty hard rap as unreliable, selfish and lacking in emotion. It is refreshing, however, to read a book where men are entirely peripheral. Alderton takes the Bechdel test and reverses it: the male characters only appear through their relationships with women.
The amicable relationship between Nina and her ex, Joe feels like unchartered literary territory and keeps the reader constantly guessing as to whether the book is going to fall into a recognisable trope of history repeating itself or lead to a monumental bust up. Instead, Alderton focusses on the smaller nuances of this changed relationship — the unusual pleasure of being able to keep such a pivotal person from your formative years as part of your life combined with the crises in identity when they meet someone new. An ex’s new partner can affirm your lack of compatibility and justify the break up but it can also call into question whether you had really ever understood each other at all.
These tensions and juxtapositions in human nature are captured brilliantly throughout the book. I deeply related to the confusion of aspiring to be a hard-lined feminist, yet also being a hopeless romantic. Alderton captures this perfectly when she writes:
‘He moved me so he was standing on the outside of the pavement. I was remained of how annoyingly delicious these patronising traditions of heteronormativety could be. Of course, the rational part of my brain wanted to tell him that he was no more capable of receiving the oncoming blow of a crashing car than I was… But I liked him standing on the outside of the pavement. I liked to feel like I was a precious and valuable thing to be guarded, like a diamond necklace in transit with a security guard. Why was a sprinkling of the patriarchy so good when it came to dating?’
Alderton’s style is deceptively light handed. The veil of neighbourly feuds, exercise classes and bottles of white wine are familiar and funny settings in which deeply relatable human insights, emotions and relationships are explored. My favourite kind of books are the ones that you read and find thoughts, opinions or observations that you thought were personal to you, articulated in a way you could never have found the words for. This is Ghosts. She has hit the millennial nail on the head. She is the voice of a generation, proven by the fact that she is appearing on Hinge profiles, one man writing ‘My mantra is to live every day in a way that would give Dolly Alderton a bit more faith in men’. I am sure Dolly will be thrilled to know she has captured the zeitgeist!
