LONDON — Dolly Alderton peered through the windows of her old house in Camden Town and squinted into the kitchen. The last time she visited a tree-lined street in London was the year before last. When she asked the current tenants if she could take a look inside, “they said, ‘Did you write a book about life here?'” she recalls. Apparently it was the first thing the landlord mentioned when advertising the property.
On that visit, the 33-year-old author was in the process of turning his memoir, “All I Know About Love,” into a TV show, which premiered in the United States on Aug. 25 in Peacock. Set in this part of north London known for its rich rock and roll history and graffiti-covered canals, Alderton has lived there for almost a decade, and she jokingly calls it “her second home in London after Buckingham Palace.” It is a tourist destination visited by
During that decade, Alderton worked as a story producer on the British reality show Made in Chelsea, wrote a dating column, and created a hit podcast.high low,” with journalist Pandora Sykes. But what defined Alderton’s era was being single in his 20s and living with friends.
When it came to adapting her memoir for the screen, Alderton said readers could relate to how she framed her relationship with childhood best friend Farly Kleiner as an “epic, epic and romantic” love story. I noticed that there is In the series, the two are fictionalized as Maggie (Emma Appleton) and Birdie (Belle Powley). With the show’s “up and downs, tension and silliness, surprise and excitement,” the seven episodes arc the story of their relationship like a romantic comedy.
Working Title Films, which produced romantic comedies such as ‘Notting Hill,’ ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary,’ and ‘Love Actually,’ acquired the film and TV rights to the memoir in 2017, when the book was still in the proposal stage. .
The production company’s co-chairman, Eric Fellner, also chose “Bridget Jones” from Helen Fielding’s book. Upon reading “All I Know About Love,” he said, “I thought this writer had the same kind of connection with an audience that Helen Fielding had all those years ago. ‘” he said in a recent phone interview. version. Both writers “can look at their generation in a brilliantly humorous way,” he added.
At a café in Primrose Hill, Alderton said that for her generation, “honesty has become obsolete” and that coming of age in the 2010s meant growing up in “very cynical times.” She said against this backdrop that “All I Know About Love” is set in 2012, “literally the year Camden stopped being cool,” Alderton added. .
Rebecca Lucy Taylor, better known as pop star self-esteem, was in an indie band at the time. She contributed three of her songs to the show’s soundtrack and said the episode was “very inspiring for the always-competitive alternate scene where everyone tries to make it look like they’re not trying.” rice field.
Birdie, Maggie, and their two housemates, Amara (Aaliyah Odofin) and Nell (Marli Siu) are all “rural or suburban” and “on the edge of everything — not in a good way,” Alderton said. Arriving in Camden, all four are hungry for a big-city experience.
This lack of urban initiation is what distinguishes Alderton’s character from his more ambitious ancestors on shows like “Sex and the City” and “Girls.” She grew up in Stanmore, a “comfortable”, “beige-carpeted” suburb of north London, where “buses are slow and infrequent,” she said. As children, she and Kleiner circled her one cul-de-sac on a scooter and wandered her mall shopping without buying anything. “All we did was talk and dream,” Alderton said, adding that the lack of stimulation gave her brain “Olympic training for imagination.” rice field.
Alderton is now one of the UK’s best-known millennial writers.Between her memoirs, podcasts, recent novels, and her gigs Suffering Aunt For British newspapers, many British young women see her as the trusted voice of a close friend.
“Women always run up to me to talk to her,” said Cherish Shirley, writer and story consultant for Everything I Know About Love. Most of the time, Alderton says, she meets “a wonderful, generous, lovely girl” she wants to talk to in a bar, bookstore, or restroom. “Because I opened a channel of communication,” she said.
But after the paperback edition of Everything I Know About Love came out in 2019, the attention began to feel “out of control.” It was “very small, very quiet, really private” time.
For the first time in her career, she began to distance herself and her work. In adapting her memoir for television, she carved her show’s protagonist into a character less self-aware and less precocious than herself.
“I think of Maggie as the one who copied 10 sheets of tracing paper from me,” Alderton said. Another difference from the book is the addition of characters of color, including Amara, a black British dancer. “A criticism of the book that I fully accept is that it was very white,” she said. Shirley said that Alderton assembled a “mixed group of women from all sorts of backgrounds” to form the show’s writers’ room, a world with its authentically diverse characters.
In March, three months before the show premiered on the BBC in the UK, Alderton said there was “a big wobble” about returning to the spotlight. The show’s executive producer, Surian Fletcher-Jones, instructed her to be a “match fit.”Alderton said she stopped drinking for a while, started her course of cognitive-behavioral therapy, I billed the production for her session.
Producer Simon Maloney, who also worked on Michaela Cole’s “I May Destroy You,” emphasized the importance of supporting female showrunners who get more out of their work. Personal experience, Alderton said. “Don’t drag a story out of a woman like that and leave her alone,” she recalled him saying.
Alderton has described himself as an “oversharer”, but lately he’s been thinking more carefully about how that sharing should be done and posting less on social media. “What I’ve just realized is that people don’t have to get into the forensic details of their emotional lives to get them to like them and have a relationship,” she said.
Fellner has revealed that Alderton has signed a studio deal with Universal Pictures for the film adaptation of her fictional debut, Ghost. She’s also researching her novels about heartbreak and loss.”The work I do in fiction is still very skimpy,” Alderton said. Because even though she’s no longer the main character, it continues to refer to her life.
“My heart and soul have had enough. Brains and life have spilled everywhere,” she said.
