I love the escapism of fiction, both reading it and creating it. I'm someone who finds reality quite a difficult realm to be in. “I was so confused and horrified by ghosting that I wrote Max to try and understand him.” Below, she reflects on the trauma of being ghosted, where she stands on autofiction, and her love of Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person.”Īfter making a career out of laying your romantic life bare, you gave up writing about yourself. “Every piece of fiction that I will write is basically me just trying to understand love, and particularly, how men behave in love,” she says. It’s a pattern Alderton’s observed with friends, and even experienced herself. They fall hard and fast, but like the title suggests, he ghosts. The book begins when Nina, a food writer in her early 30s, meets a new boyfriend named Max on a dating app. Now, Alderton’s channeling her exploration of modern love into a new medium - having written her debut novel, Ghosts. “I’m in a period of my life where, when it comes to love, men, women, monogamy, families, babies, marriage, I’ve never been more uncertain.” “There was definitely a confidence of thought in the voice of that 28-year-old writer that sometimes really embarrasses me, but unless you're someone who's not self-examining (or you're extremely arrogant), life goes in cycles of total certainty and then total destabilization,” she tells Bustle. But now, at 32, Alderton doesn’t recognize the woman who, just four years ago, had enough convictions about love to fill a book with them. For these efforts, she earned a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 List.

Why wouldn’t she? It was the year she published her memoir, Everything I Know About Love, which went on to win the British Book Award for autobiography, and launched a podcast miniseries, Love Stories, which featured interviews with subjects like Vanessa Kirby, Stanley Tucci, and Sharon Horgan. When Dolly Alderton was 28, she thought she had all the answers.

Ghosts dolly alderton max