“... It’s my prerogative to streamline this world. That’s the privilege and joy of being given this amazing job. Cranking up the comedy, cranking up the drama, that’s your right, and I’m so glad that I did it.”
the late-lamented weekly pop-culture and current affairs podcast she fronted with best friend Pandora Sykes was compulsory listening for the four years they produced it. Her solo podcast, Love Stories, in which she invites celebrities and creatives to share their great loves, is similarly enthralling. She’s been on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Where the average 30-something could write everything they know about love on the back of a postage stamp, Alderton was just 29 when she took what she learned during her raucous 20s and turned it into a best-selling memoir, for which she won the UK’s 2018 National Book Award for autobiography.
Her second book, 2020’s Ghosts, was fiction, and with the TV version of Everything I Know About Love, she gets to fictionalise her past, too.
Having made her name by over-sharing in classic Millennial style, the half-Canadian,
British-born 34-year-old reckons she has said everything she has to say about herself. Her focus now is on telling the truth through fiction.
Kill your darlings, twice
In the 2018 memoir, she tells the tale – warts, cajoled cabbies and all – of the time she got so drunk, she took a cab from London to Leamington Spa in the middle of the night in search of a good time.
The chapter, called A Hellraiser Heads for
There was still a lot she wanted to keep from the novel – specifically that sense of destiny, that two people were always meant to be, because the universe had forced them together.
Alderton really did meet a boy on a train in 2008, only to bump into him in a bar two years later. She really did set his flatmate up with her best friend, and they really did end up going out for seven years much to Dolly/Maggie’s chagrin.
It works for the show, because it harks back to romcoms such as Before Sunset, that Alderton grew up loving; it also wrong-foots the audience into thinking this is the big romance the’re signing up for (no spoilers, but it really isn’t).
“It felt like it gave a sense of weight to the story. I also liked the irony that, when my friend was taken away from me because of this really intense relationship, and it was very frustrating for me for the entirety of seven years, it was all my own f ...... fault.
“Maggie is like me, very, very romantic; very in her own head and very obsessed with the mythology of her own recent past.” The flip side of being free to fictionalise her