Dolly Alderton knows a thing or two about mining life’s most intimate moments for creative material. Her hit memoir Everything I Know About Love distilled lessons learned the messy way in her 20s about romance in all its guises, and when she later published her debut novel, Ghosts, its plot felt tantalisingly autobiographical, centring on a successful young writer’s app-enhanced attempts at finding a lasting relationship. Good Material is her second novel and it allows Alderton to reflect on heartbreak-as-muse while simultaneously propelling her into a more definitively fictional realm, narrated as it is by a male protagonist.
His name is Andy and he’s a 35-year-old jobbing comedian who was still awaiting his big break when Jen, his girlfriend of three years, 10 months and 29 days, dumped him. Or as he puts it, “smashed my heart like a sinewy pinata”. She says it’s because she wants to be single but he doesn’t believe her, and is convinced that if he can only determine the real reason, they may yet reunite.
