On Sunday 19 November, Edinburgh’s Usher Hall was treated to a reunion of the High Low podcast with An Audience with Dolly Alderton, interviewed by her former co-host, Pandora Sykes. Dolly Alderton is currently on tour, doing events to celebrate the release of her new novel Good Material, which has reached number five on The Sunday Times Bestseller List.
The novel focuses on Andy, a male comedian, and his experience of heartbreak. Alderton warmly captures “The Madness” after a break-up but also looks at when Andy’s sadness veers into self-indulgence.
The event started a bit late because the audience was “still at the bar in their jeans and their nice tops and their heels, getting their white wine.” The audience erupted as Alderton walked on in a blue mini dress and vintage four-inch Miu Miu heels; “Where are your shoes from?” was a question swiftly answered in the Q&A section of the evening.
Sykes led a deft interview about the inspiration behind Good Material with its clear echoes of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. Asked if she hoped more men would read her new novel as it is about a male comedian, she looked out into the audience and said, “these are my girls,” joking any sale’s a sale but she didn’t want to be a literary pick me girl.
The novel looks at the male experience after a breakup and the lack of emotional expression within male friendships. Alderton said during the production of her TV series Everything I Know About Love, a series based on her memoir about the magic of female friendships, she would come home and crave stories about brotherhood. The Beatles, the Gallagher brothers, Blair and Brown. Her first novel, Ghosts, followed a “sad girl” Nina who is ghosted and has to look after her dying father. Alderton said writing a novel is like living with that character for a year, she didn’t want to be housemates with another sad girl so decided to write about Andy – a comedian who is both incredibly self-aware and oblivious to his own shortcomings.
She interviewed male friends and comedians as research for the novel and revelled in being able to ask them questions she wouldn’t normally be able to without being “weird at a barbeque”. Sykes raised a part in Good Material where Andy says men are entitled to “one NHS pub session for a break-up” but beyond that you’re in “BUPA territory”. Alderton said she was fascinated by this reluctance to dissect relationships and their breakdowns, saying her and her friends still comb over texts received in 2006.
The Q&A in the second half revealed the niche part of culture Alderton has carved out. It’s almost like there was preliminary reading required and the audience had all brushed up beforehand – questions with references to episodes of The High-Low from years ago, questions asking which man from Sex and the City she would marry (cue actual gasps when she said she would kill Steve), questions about Farley (a central character in Everything I Know About Love), and Sentimental In the City co-host Caroline O’Donoghue’s name got a cheer.
The questions flitted between ones like “What do you think of men who only take one paracetamol?”, asking for advice on making friends after leaving university, and ended with a heartwarming answer to the question “What is your proudest achievement?”. With her trademark love for female friendship, Alderton said she was most proud of herself and her friends for committing to each other “not just in terms of support, but for memories, and for fun, and for silliness”. And as the audience spilled out onto Lothian Road, I think we were all reminded of how much we owe to the women in our lives.
Image courtesy of Emma Gordon.