Style columnist Dolly Alderton's cult memoir Everything I Know About Love recalls the gloriously messy twentysomething years — think bad boys, cheap booze and intense female friendships — and it's now a TV series. Megan Agnew meets its star.
Emma Appleton spent her twenties waiting to turn 30. She didn't realise it at the time, when she was in the thick of it all — the job rejections and silly nights out and rubbish dates and weird flat-shares in cities so big no one notices you're in them — but on her 30th birthday, a few months ago, she simply felt: "Oh, finally!"
"It was quite amazing, the relief," she says. "I was still figuring myself out in my twenties, but now I know myself more, I know what I want, I have a lot less tolerance and I won't put up with things, particularly dating-wise."
This week she will appear on British TV screens as the lead in Everything I Know About Love, the BBC adaptation of the memoir by writer and podcaster Dolly Alderton. Like the book, the show is about the fear and freedom of your twenties and the friends who go through it all with you.
Appleton "absolutely devoured" the book. "It feels like a part of you," she says when we meet in Soho for coffee. She is tall and sparrow-like, with a bob like a cool French girl and large saucer eyes. "It was a huge book for young women because no one had put down our experiences like that. And Dolly is bloody funny, so you want to be her mate."
It is difficult to state the significance of Everything I Know About Love without spilling over into sycophancy. Published in 2018, it has shifted nearly half a million copies in the UK and been sold in 28 countries, while Alderton has been hailed as the "Nora Ephron for the Tinder generation". It is a nostalgic Noughties romp through Alderton's teenage years, with MSN chat rooms and awkward snogs, an account of her boozy time at university, followed by her raucous twenties in London. I read it when I had just left university myself, its pages folded over for friends and extracts sent around on WhatsApp groups.
The reason it was so popular was that it felt like the first time someone had given weight to all the bits of life that young women had otherwise been told were silly or frothy or unimportant: the abandonment of your great mate getting a new boyfriend, the heartbreak of being ghosted by someone you met on the internet, the existential panic when you realise that life is just "f***ing Tottenham Court Road and ordering shit off Amazon". It was deeply reassuring in a period when reassurance is all you need, when it feels like everything is a bit of a mess, when it feels like you are getting it all wrong somehow. Mostly though, it was a thrill to read about the ecstasy and intimacy of female friendship, put on an equal footing with romantic love.
The show, written and executive-produced by Alderton, is based around Maggie — the Dolly character in the book — and her three mates, who move into their first grown-up flat together in Camden a decade too late for the area's Britpop coolness. They drink cheap wine from the offie, make up dance routines using a dehumidifier as a wind machine, go to sticky-floored nightclubs where there's a kebab spinning in the corner, and roll down the hill at Hampstead Heath as the sun comes up, simply because they can.
"Female friendship is really quite magical," Appleton says. "And we were all living it on set." She met her on-screen best friends Bel Powley, Marli Siu and Aliyah Odoffin during rehearsal week and they have been inseparable since. "Once we started chatting, they couldn't stop us. We went out for dinners, all living in the same apartment block when we were filming [in Manchester]. One night we were, like, how ridiculous would it be if we got a limo to our wrap party? And we all looked at each other and said, 'We're going to get a limo to our wrap party, aren't we?' It was the gaudiest prom-style limo, lots of UV lighting, but we thought we were hilarious."
In one scene Maggie pretends to a boy she fancies that she has been at a party in east London, when really she has been drinking wine in her living room alone, getting ready to "casually" drop past his house on her "way home". "Dolly's writing made us feel like we were all doing all those cringey things we thought no one else was doing at the time," Appleton says. "Thank goodness! In my twenties I would change myself for someone to like me more. With boyfriends I was very much like" — she puts on a meek and mild voice — "'I'll do whatever you wanna do.' That sense of self has developed so much in the past five years for me. Now I know that it's not all about giving everything over to someone else." She says she's in a "really happy, healthy relationship" now, but that's all I'm getting.
Has she ever internet-dated? Alderton was the dating columnist for this magazine for many years and online dating features heavily in the show. "I did very briefly. There's something hilarious and cringey about what people choose to put on their profile, so I was basically taking the piss out of one of my friend's Hinge accounts and she said, 'Why don't you set one up, then?' So I was like, 'You know what, fine, I will!' I did it for about two weeks but I didn't like it, the catalogue of people."
Dating apps have certainly "shortened the attention span" of our generation, she continues. "You get a new shiny person, you date them for a few weeks, then you start seeing them for who they are because people are flawed and complicated, but then you can just go and get someone new and shiny and start the whole process again."
Appleton grew up with a younger brother in Witney, a small town in Oxfordshire; her mother is a nurse for the NHS, her father an architect. She was an anxious child — "about everything", she says, eyes wide. "I never felt settled in the world. I didn't really get to grips with life or going to school. You couldn't pay me to go back." She tried to make it in to school for drama lessons but would often stay at home during the day. "The world felt big and scary. It was very much always worst-case scenario is going to happen. Convinced of it. I'm so much better at coping with it now, but I had to completely restructure my natural way of thinking, which I've worked on in quite a lot of therapy."
Appleton "wrote off" a drama degree because she couldn't sing. Instead, after leaving school at 18, she moved to London to pursue modelling, packed into a "model house" by her agency.
"I was so young, and you're on your own, trying to figure it out. There needs to be an independent body, a models' union, to make sure agencies are invested in the wellbeing of their young men and women. The industry isn't regulated, agencies take an extortionate percentage [of your wage], and I don't think we should be putting 15-year-olds in swimsuits for advertisements. Why are we doing that?"
Commodifying her body also changed the way she understood it. "You become so aware that whether you get a job is based on how you look and how slim you are. It's not good for you. I mean, no one is coming to you for creative ideas. That is your value in this world and that stretches to what you feel is your value in your regular life."
At one point she got "thinner and thinner and thinner" because of stress, "and I thought, 'Oh wow, if I'm losing weight then I'm doing the right thing.' It's so sad."
In her mid-twenties she got a role in a short film, which she gave a "bloody good go" — and she loved it, so much that she kept acting, appearing in the BBC thriller Clique and the Netflix fantasy drama The Witcher. "I'm annoyed it took that long for me to have that confidence and to feel strongly enough about something," she says.
After years of feeling like she didn't have enough confidence to act, Appleton is currently starring in another big hit: she plays a fictionalised Nancy Spungen, the girlfriend of Sid Vicious who is haunted by drug addiction, in Danny Boyle's series Pistol, which is streaming on Disney+ now. "There were so many layers to playing Nancy — the make-up, the hair, the voice, the clothes — so you peel the character away at the end of the day," she says. "I found it easier to leave her at the door than playing Maggie, whose life is not too dissimilar from mine."
Appleton recently moved back in with flatmates in Camberwell, going for walks, to the pub, watching telly, all the normal stuff, trying not to think about how her life might change this summer. She "absolutely adores" Alderton, who spent a lot of time on set. "I would consider her a friend. I hope she thinks the same," she says, laughing. "For the record," she leans down to my Dictaphone on the table, "Dolly, we're friends, OK! But I do feel like there's quite an amazing bond that has been forged, the fact she has trusted me to play Maggie."
Everything I Know About Love has certainly made Appleton reflect on her twenties and that decade's ups and downs and muddles. "I think the main lesson is that nothing has to be the same for the rest of your life — you don't need to know exactly what you're doing all the time."
Written by: Megan Agnew
© The Times of London