Dear Dolly

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

'What I learnt from sharing my most private pain with a semi-professional problem-solver was that the mere act of asking for help was, in itself, healing. It was as if I had crept down to the docks under cover of darkness and floated a message out in a bottle, imagining how it might be received. By writing it, I was acknowledging that someone might care about me; that they'd be able to say the right thing without knowing me. Because I was feeling something that other people had felt and therefore I wasn't, as I suspected, the loneliest and strangest woman in the world'

Since early 2020, Dolly Alderton has been sharing her wisdom, warmth and wit with the countless people who have written in to her Dear Dolly agony aunt column in The Sunday Times Style. Their questions range from the painfully - and sometimes hilariously - relatable to the occasionally bizarre. They include breakups and body issues, families, friendships, dating, divorce, the pleasures and pitfalls of social media, sex, loneliness, longing, love and everything in between.

Without judgement, and with deep empathy informed by her own, much-chronicled adventures in love, friendship and dating, Dolly leads us by the hand through the various labyrinths of life, proving that a problem shared is truly a problem halved.

'Alderton is Nora Ephron for the millennial generation' Elizabeth Day

© Dolly Alderton 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Critics Review

  • A compendium of good advice from her Sunday Times columns, Dear Dolly is Dolly Alderton at her wise, warm and witty best. All of human life is contained in these pages: from dating apps to eating disorders, too much sex, not enough sex and the ebb and flow of friendships, relationships and situationships. I felt like a better, kinder person for having read these letters and Dolly’s thoughtful replies

    Red
  • With a thoughtful essay about what answering others’ questions has taught her, this collection of Alderton’s agony aunt advice offers bundles of empathy (and zero judgement) about life’s problems, from totally relatable dilemmas to the entertainingly voyeuristic

    Grazia
  • Her refreshing take makes for compulsive reading. The result is an oddly soothing book, as the problems of others leave you not with a sense of schadenfreude but with the comforting realisation that something you have felt, or are feeling, has been felt by countless others – and it will always be that way

    Daily Mail
  • Alderton has struck a chord with a generation … Invaluable … A must for die-hard Dolly fans

    Heat
  • Dolly Alderton is so gifted at making people care. A rare talent

    Marian Keyes
  • Alderton is Nora Ephron for the millennial generation

    Elizabeth Day

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