Ask Me Anything - Harper's BAZAAR

Dolly Alderton, the author, journalist, podcaster, screenwriter and advice columnist, talks to Alexandra English about the enduring appeal of the Agony Aunt 

For unbiased and honest advice about life’s most absurd, outrageous, confusing, sad or seemingly insubstantial problems, sometimes you can only turn to a stranger. This is why Agony Aunts have existed for nearly a century. The first, Elizabeth Gilmer (aka Dorothy Dix), was reportedly earning more than the President of the United States of America at the height of her popularity in 1929. Her column was so in-demand that she carried it with her as she moved from newspaper to newspaper. 

The advent of the internet and social media has, of course, democratised advice giving. Countless Instagram accounts, podcasts, websites and TikTok creators offer unsolicited advice on how to be your best self while living your best life. But a small cohort of Agony Aunts (and Uncles) are sticking to the traditional question-answer format, while modernising it by treating their columns as two-way confessionals. Think Cheryl Strayed’s “Dear Sugar” column for The Rumpus; Heather Havrilesky’s “Ask Polly”, which was published on The Cut and is now on Substack; psychotherapist Philippa Perry’s “Ask Philippa” on The Guardian; and the musician Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files email newsletter — all of which include responses that detail the advice giver’s own misgivings, mistakes and regrets. These strangers provide solid ground in a sea of ennui; they are who you turn to when you’re feeling untethered; when you’ve looked for an adult and realised you’re the adult; when you need someone to tell you that you’re not alone and you’re going to be okay. These people are an antidote to polished “Hey guys” influencers: they are honest about their flaws and allow us to peek behind the curtain at their faults. 

In this way, it makes sense Dolly Alderton would become a Agony Aunt for millennials. From 2015 to 2017, when she was in her twenties, she wrote a dating column in the UK’s The Sunday Times style segment, in which she put herself “on the frontline” of dating “bankers, lawyers, musicians, barmen, taxi drivers and conspiracy theorists”. She wrote her memoir, Everything I Know About Love, at 25, a raucously funny, self-deprecating collection of essays about a decade of ill-advised relationships, one-night stands and formidable female friendships. It won the 2018 National Book Award for autobiography and was shortlisted for the 2019 Non-Fiction Narrative Book of the Year in the British Book Awards. In the book’s accompanying podcast, Love Stories, Alderton spoke to Stanley Tucci, Vanessa Kirby, Marian Keyes and others about their formative crushes, loves and heartbreaks. Earlier this year, the book was adapted into a television series of the same name, pouring accelerant on the careers of Emma Appleton and Bel Powley, who play fictionalised versions of Alderton and her real-life best friend, Farley. Among other ventures, Alderton gained legions of fans by co-hosting The High Low podcast with Pandora Sykes. The literary, current affairs and pop culture podcast was like eavesdropping on two friends chatting over a Wednesday night white wine and bowl of chips. During its four-year run, they released more than 150 episodes, which were downloaded 30 million times. In 2020, Alderton released her debut novel, Ghosts, about food writer Nina and the man she meets through a dating app while dealing with her father’s advancing dementia. After we speak, she’s heading back to her desk to continue working on her second novel. 

Alderton been described variously as “the best friend you met in the toilet of a nightclub and became immediately obsessed with” (The Independent), “Your wacky aunt” (The Telegraph UK), “Nora Ephron for the millennial generation” (Elizabeth Day), and “Our Bridget Jones, our Carrie Bradshaw” (Glamour). Her confessional output has also seen her compared to those other voices of the millennial generation, Lena Dunham and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. (These are lazy, sexist comparisons, Alderton told The Guardian: “Having got their head around one woman, people can’t be bothered understanding others.”)

 Alderton put a stop to her first-person pieces in 2020, preferring to deal in the intimacy of responding to other people’s narratives in her “Dear Dolly” advice column for The Sunday Times. While she’s adamant that she’s not a sage or a philosopher (“I’m not Alain de Botton,” she says, laughing. “I don’t think I’m equipped to give a rigorous life philosophy”), she is uniquely qualified for the position of millennial Agony Aunt. She has been an avid consumer of advice columns since she discovered teen magazine problem pages; she has written to Nick Cave in a moment of desperation; and has a loyal following of lost girls ready to devour her every word (and drunkenly ambush her Instagram DMs at 4am). 

Her new book, Dear Dolly is a collection of these letters, compiled into topics such as Relationships, Friendship and Dating.

Harper’s BAZAAR: Your opening line to the book’s introductory essay is a killer: “I was at an all-time low when I decided I wanted to fix everyone else’s problems.” At a time when you probably needed advice the most, you wanted to offer advice to others.

Dolly Alderton: Twenty-twenty was probably the worst year of my life, as it was for most people. I was having a number of personal things happen — it felt like every month there was a different thing. It was a bad, bad time. I still think about it a lot — I feel very scared of ever having a time like that again. It’s weird when you have periods like that, and there’s a sort of serenity in settling into: I’m just in a period of tremendously bad luck, and I’m gonna have to just push through it. 

I remember sitting on the step of my cottage in the morning, looking out to sea, drinking a tea and having like a million cigarettes — I became a heavy smoker again that year, I’ve given up again — and ringing my editor. I was like, “I’d like to do an advice column.” Looking back, I think it was some sort of convoluted way of finding perspective, hope, solace, comfort and community. It was only when I started compiling the letters for the book that I realised, Oh, that’s all the things I was looking for when I started the column. 

HB: Advice columns have been around for about 100 years. What do you think is behind their enduring appeal, for both the agonised and the readers? 

DA: I always think of that Fleabag quote when she says to the priest, “I want someone to tell me what to do and what to wear.” I think the psychological profile of humans is that you never really feel like you’re grown. I think you basically always feel like a clueless teenager. You always want to just ring your mum or ask a teacher: “Please tell me what to do.”

HB: You always want an adult.

DA: Yes, my mum is in her sixties, and she said she still reflexively goes to ring her mother, who’s been dead for 30 years, to say, “What do I do?” I just don’t think adults are hugely cognitively equipped to look after themselves. I think we all feel very lost. An Agony Aunt, by their job title, has to give you a takeaway. I think there’s something really appealing in knowing that you’re going to get someone who says, “This is what I think you should do.”

HB: Also, I would think that part of the appeal is that if you’re the one writing in, you get to control the narrative. You write that Graham Norton advised you to think of all perspectives.

DA: That’s the only thing that’s quite tricky. I am very aware that you are writing a manicured version of your problem, which is an incredibly complicated and multi-layered thing, in 300 words. Equally, I want to go to the readers with good faith, and I want to believe people are writing the truth; I don’t want to be suspicious. 

The easy thing to do would be to side with the person who’s writing in, lionise their version of the story, diminish and dismiss 

 the people they’re talking about; say it doesn’t matter, be on their side, and that would take me like 40 minutes to write. The hardest thing in writing, and the hardest thing in advice-giving, and the hardest thing in any sort of tricky life situation, is to be empathetic in the round, to be empathetic to all parties involved, or to at least attempt to be.

The other day, I got a letter from a woman who felt very wounded and was very defensive about the fact that her husband’s friends had turned on her when they got divorced. And I think I did a slight failure in that reply. When I read it, something didn’t track, and the readers noticed it and said: “It feels like this woman isn’t telling a part of the story of why her marriage broke down.” And when I read it back, I was like, This whole account, which is quite inexplicable, would make so much more sense if you had cheated on your husband. If that had been the case, I wish she’d told me because I’m never ever going to tell someone off or tell them they’re a bad person.

HB: This book actually goes beyond the letters. You can pick it up at any point, turn to any letter, and either you’ll see something that you can relate to, or you see something that you can’t relate to, but you’ll get insight into how other people live. The book is bigger than the sum of its parts in that way; you’ve got the individual letters, but they add up to this tome about the human condition.

DA: That is accidental on my part. You’re right — week on week, they are letters, but consolidated, they are a method of living a life. The thing with an Agony Aunt column is that you’re always answering a letter: you’re not writing an article, you’re always in correspondence with someone. I don’t think the goal is really to make life easier for that individual and to fix that individual’s problem — that is what you hope happens — but if that was a goal, I’d start up some sort of unbelievably expensive, extortionate-to-subscribe-to Substack for £50 billion a month, or set up an Agony Aunt Only Fans [laughing], and I would write private letters to people. But that’s not what I’m doing: what I’m doing is showcasing the challenges of life that we all go through, and I’m using these letters that are from real people — I really hope that my answer reaches them and is helpful — but more broadly speaking, I’m using that answer to exemplify a problem and a solution, universally. 

HB: You talk about your own messy life, your own mistakes, and I think that is part of the appeal. You know, I would think: I’m not writing to this oracle of moral goodness, I’m writing to someone who also makes mistakes.

DA: Totally. I was slightly resistant to putting a book together because I still make mistakes on, like, an hourly basis. I’ve lived a very small life in a lot of ways, but there is one place in my life where I do think I am sort of an adventurer, and where I do feel like I’ve seen things and learnt a lot and had precarious moments and put myself in danger and recovered — that’s with my heart. 

I have had an emotionally adventurous and precarious life so far in terms of the ups and downs of my romantic life and my relationships, and just my emotional life. I’ve done a huge amount of work on the insides of me and why I’ve made the decisions I’ve made and what I’ve learnt from them. So that’s my version of climbing Everest; my version of being able to feel like I’ve got something I can talk about.

HB: One last question: are you good at taking your own advice?

DA: No, terrible. 

Dear Dolly: On Love, Life and Friendship, by Dolly Alderton (Penguin, $35), is out now. This article originally appeared in the December 2022 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR.