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Everything I Know About Love, review: a painfully honest love letter to millennial women
Dolly Alderton's memoir has become a warm, funny and wincingly accurate TV drama about female friendship

Everything I Know About Love, review: a painfully honest love letter to millennial women

Based on the bestselling memoir by 33-year-old journalist Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love (BBC One) begins with the caveat that parts of the show are “fictionalised when life didn’t offer a good enough story”. But for many women under the age of 35, this tender, comic and wincingly accurate portrayal of navigating love, friendship and your early twenties in London will feel like anything but fiction. It’s not often we millennials are allowed to feel nostalgic, but it’s almost impossible to finish Everything I Know About Love without having sent a barrage of WhatsApp messages to old friends and flatmates, each beginning: “Remember when…?”

Twenty-four-year-old friends Maggie, Birdy, Nell and Amara have just moved into their first London home, in Camden, where they use any excuse – a new job, a lost job – to open a bottle of wine on a Monday and spend hours practising dance routines in mismatched pyjamas before snuggling in bed together (though while wishing Maggie would wear pants). And while most of their conversations revolve around boys – from disaster dates to overstaying boyfriends who use up too much of the hot water – the love story at the heart of this story has nothing to do with them.

Instead, it’s about Maggie (Alderton’s fictional alter ego) and her oldest friend, Birdy. Maggie (played with dollops of charisma by rising star Emma Appleton) is the fun one. An aspiring writer who lands a dream job story-producing for a reality TV show (as Alderton herself did on Made in Chelsea, before becoming the Sunday Times’s dating columnist), she’s always chasing a party, even if that means hailing a black cab from London to Liverpool in the early hours of the morning to meet the one friend still going. 

Meanwhile Birdy (an adorable Bel Powley) is the sensible one: she presents a PowerPoint presentation at an interview for a counter job at John Lewis and has a meltdown when the salmon platter she bought as a “future heirloom” is used for lines of cocaine. But they are perfect for each other: Birdy tirelessly peels Maggie out of sticky situations while Maggie encourages Birdy to be a little braver. So when Birdy falls in love with her first boyfriend and decides to move in with him, Maggie experiences her first real heartbreak.

Television is awash with middle-class white women wreaking havoc on their perfectly nice lives after too many glasses of chardonnay (hello, Sally Rooney), and some may roll their eyes at Maggie’s privilege and narcissism. But Alderton (who also created the show) has always been a wryly self-deprecating writer and her obvious self-awareness keeps this love letter to female friendship as charming as her memoir.