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 our TV screens as the lead
in Everything I Know About Love, the BBC adaptation of
the memoir by the Style columnist Dolly Alderton. Like the
book the show is about the fear and freedom of your twen-
ties 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. Sheis 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 thatStyle columnist Dolly Alderton’s cult memoir Everything I Know About
Love recalls the marvellously 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
‘It was a huge
book for young
women. No one
had put down
our experiences
like that’
Photographs Danny Kasirye Styling Luke Day12 • The Sunday Times Style