DOLLY ALDERTON ON GIVING ADVICE

I want to do everything I can to provide women with the solace that I’m always looking for

When Covid hit in 2020, award-winning author and journalist Dolly Alderton stopped mining her own life for content and instead pitched herself as an agony aunt for a popular weekly column in the UK. As she releases a compilation of her favourite letters, she reveals how many of life’s conundrums are actually common to us all.

Iwas at an all-time low when I decided I wanted to try to fix everyone else’s problems. My head was a mess and my heart was broken. It was one of those years where every month brought a new sadness – an annus horribilis, I think they call it. And, in a mean-spirited move from Fate, My Bad Year also coincided with THE Bad Year – 2020. The most horribilis of all the annuses.

During that time, I pitched myself as an agony aunt to my editor at the Sunday Times Style. I had always wanted to be an agony aunt. In my adolescence, I would buy teen magazines and immediately skip to the problem pages. Sex was discussed in my house, I imagine much more than it would have been for boomers (the last victims of Victorian parenting). But there were no specifics. Instead, it was couched in the vagaries of baby-making and ‘tingly feelings’ and ‘when you care about someone very much’. I needed more. Problem pages were my salvation – my perverted eyes would dart over the pages looking for key words. I took these tips and passed them off as my own, becoming the Playground Sexual Yoda.

I would vastly exaggerate my own experiences and give counsel to girls my own age and older. I think my obsession with being an agony aunt perhaps stemmed from this desire – I wanted to be the well-lived woman handing out advice, rather than the galumphing schoolgirl lying on her bed reading it.

Many of the problems I was sent in my first year of agony aunting were underpinned by Covid. I received a lot of letters from people who had fallen out with family members because of differing politics, something that discussions of Covid made impossible to avoid. Agonizers wrote in describing their loneliness, sadness at missing out on life, fear they were not making the most of being young or single.

Another recurring letter consisted of admissions from the long-married that they were thinking about their first love. This was both inevitable and relatable to me, someone who became an archivist of their own relationships during the lockdowns.

Bereft of physical connection, I found comfort in the virtual. I read WhatsApp conversations with best friends that dated back to 2017. I scrolled back to the first photo on my iPhone in 2010 and flipped through my history like it was a glossy magazine in the hairdresser’s. I googled the names of old boyfriends followed by ‘LinkedIn’ or ‘JustGiving’ to see if I could get back in touch with who they were and are, without getting back in touch with them.

Most of the letters I get are from straight women writing in about men. Women’s letters mostly follow the template of: ‘Here’s my problem, here’s why I think it’s my fault, here’s why I know it’s not really a problem so I feel silly for writing to you, thank you for reading this, even writing it down has made me feel a bit better. Am I a bad person?’ Whereas male agonizers tend to feel much more comfortable with placing blame on whoever they’re writing about, and are confident in the fact that their problem really is a problem and one that is worthy of discussion.

Sometimes it’s hard not to feel a bit blue about it all. If I were to look at the majority of letters I get week on week and put them all side by side, the story is one of female anxiety; of not feeling good enough. Of worrying that we’re not being the right sort of girl from birth to death. Every decade of womanhood is marked by a new self-doubt.

This is particularly relevant when I get my most common letter, which is from women who are terrified that they’re not going to have children. I feel personally invested in this topic as the years I’ve spent writing the column have coincided with the period of my life where fertility scaremongering is inescapable. I want to do everything I can to provide women with the solace that I’m always looking for.

To be reminded that a lot of fertility ‘facts’ are based on outdated and unsubstantiated science, that there is more than one way of having a family and that, most importantly, you never know how quickly your life is going to change.

These letters – the ones where women fear they aren’t being the right kind of women – are the ones I find the easiest to respond to.

My replies are an attempt at healing my own wounds as well as those of the women who’ve written to me. I went through every word of advice I’ve committed to print and I can see that, while I’m no longer a ‘tell-all’ writer, my most complicated emotions and my most sacred experiences hide in plain sight in these columns. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in the moment of my life when I thought I had a handle on nothing, I decided to advise strangers on everything.

I could, in most cases, begin each response with: Dear Dolly. Dear Dolly: On Love, Life and Friendship (Fig Tree, $35) by Dolly Alderton, is on sale November 1.