A Good Old Reading Break
Dolly Alderton, showing rather than telling, and filling my cup.
Dear reader,
I hope I’ve arrived in time for your lunch break today. My writing schedule’s gone a bit wonky, and this is me playing catch-up. I’ve been spending the week worrying a bit more than I should, so I doused all my anxieties into a book. Taking time off to read is my idea of Paradise. The smell of the pages, the way words on paper turn into a film of your own making, the way time drifts by without you noticing: it’s gorgeous.
However, while reading, I was struck by a question: where have all the blogging girls gone? Do they inevitably turn into mommypreneurs or has the Internet tired all of us out with its technicolour, bite sized, subtitled videos? The closest thing to a popular blog I can imagine is Emma Chamberlain’s podcast, Anything Goes. Maybe it’s because life seemed most exciting on 2014 Tumblr, but I’ve missed a good old fashioned blog. Thankfully, I got my hands on a copy of Dolly Alderton’s 2018 memoir Everything I Know About Love.
Needless to say, the hype is real - it’s absolutely riveting. The first page alone was uncannily relatable, and her writing is so magnetic there’s nothing to do after except be sucked in and keep reading. She is funny, she is chaotic, she is profound, she is living her twenties with absolute honesty - navigating all the things we didn’t see on those best-friends-living-their-best-lives TV shows and films.
Considering the state of popular literature these days, going back to this 2018-published memoir has been an absolute delight. Dolly Alderton writes with a voice you cannot ignore - and each sentence will leave you in splits. Her writing is full of life, full of memory, full of plain simple truth - and put on the page, they gain a straightforward power I’ve sorely missed.
This week I’ve been thinking about showing people I love them instead of just saying it - cooking a meal for them, sending them links, or just taking the time to listen even when you’ve got a million other things on your mind. It’s my new small rebellion against adulthood and also the thing that makes me feel more adult: to be able to say no to inane WhatsApp calls in favour of listening to my grandmother’s childhood anecdotes for the hundredth time.
After a couple of weeks of being overworked, overstimulated and just quite exhausted - I managed to get stuck with a cold and an absolute aversion to screens (working at a job you love means taking a break is just that much harder). In that week of syrups, soup, and undivided attention from my usually sassy puppy, I had time to really, truly fill my own cup again.
I hope you are, too.
Kaav