“Living with your friends is a sacred, special time that can never be forgotten.” So says actor Bel Powley, who spent most of her 20s living with her best friend Lola, chalking up plenty of “verrrrry terrible stories”, before buying a house with her boyfriend and deciding: “I couldn’t bear to say goodbye to Lola – so I just brought her with.”
It’s exactly the right attitude for one of the leads in Everything I Know About Love, BBC One’s much-anticipated adaptation of Dolly Alderton’s memoir of the same name. Alderton was already well known as a chronicler of the female millennial experience – as a Sunday Times columnist and co-host of the successful High Low podcast – when she published her coming-of-age story in 2018. Warm, funny and for many women the definition of #relatable, Everything I Know About Love was a publishing phenomenon, selling more than 300,000 copies in the UK, mostly through word of mouth. Appetite for Alderton’s big-hearted, sometimes hard-won wisdom was such that a later edition was published with an additional chapter of “everything I know at 30”.
