The day I decided to change the name of my character
in the screenplay adaptation of my memoir was the day
two producers were debating the reason she struggled
to commit to a relationship. “She’s addicted to the
FANTASY of love and so she can’t find it because of her
narcissism!” one put forward. “No, she’s TERRIFIED of
being truly vulnerable with someone and that’s why she’s
so scared of love!” said the other. That was also the begin-
ning of the realisation that writing a strictly autobiograph-
ical series of my life would not only lead to a certain kind
of madness but also was too restrictive. I wanted to
expand the world of my memoir and not be tied down
to the facts of real life. Not only would Dolly become
Maggie, but Maggie would become a person a few times
removed from me. (I quickly found that we could analyse
Maggie’s character flaws all we liked and it wouldn’t make
me squirm.) And the show would be semi-fictional.
Inspired by, and not based on, the story of my twenties.
After I made that decision, writing the show became
much easier. When you’re writing about real life, you’re
constrained by how unresolved the plot of real life
can be. Real life often doesn’t have a satisfying
structure. There aren’t lessons presented to you
after you make mistakes. In real life you think of
the best thing to say in a situation when you’re
on the bus home and it’s too late. In scripted life
all these things can be readdressed.
I enjoyed the freedom of being able to
reorder life in this way. And I loved that it
was built on something that was so
personal to me. When you’re building a
world for a novel, it’s you and a laptop
and the head of departments that live
in your imagination. When you’re
building a world for a TV show, you
get human heads of department —
experts who create costumes and
props and hair and make-up and sets
to make the world of the show as
fully formed as possible.
This was particularly important,
as I was setting the show in a 2012
London house-share with flash-
backs to suburbia in the early-
to-mid Noughties. To make the
viewing experience as nostalgic aspossible we had to have all these expert eyes on the
details. What songs would be in the background of
the flashbacks (Hear’Say), what clothes the girls would
wear on nights out (Kate Moss for Topshop). Nearly all
the clothes the main four characters wear are high street
buys from 2012 or the type of vintage clothing everyone
bought at that time (artificially glamorous, a bit musty,
highly flammable). The first time the head of costume
showed me the rails of clothes, I was delighted to see
that, by total coincidence, they included two Topshop
dresses and a skirt that hang in my own wardrobe.
We decided the girls’ house-share should have glori-
ously grubby touches, capturing the domestic space that
lies somewhere between studenthood and adulthood.
We never wanted to show a radiator that didn’t have
knickers and mismatched socks hanging off it. The first
day of filming was at Maggie’s family home in the
suburbs, and I helped the art director to add the finishing
touches to her room, which, I was happy to see, included
a cut-out magazine photo of Will Young.
I once heard Elizabeth Gilbert, the author
of the memoir Eat Pray Love, say of the
book’s film adaptation: “I don’t think I
processed it — I don’t think I’ll ever process it.”
My story is on a smaller scale (although one day
I hope to recast an old boyfriend as Javier
Bardem), but those words were in my head
for so much of the past 18 months I’ve
spent making the show. Sometimes
things in life are so bewildering, so inex-
plicable, so mind-explodingly trippy,
that they are not meant to be
analysed and understood. Only
experienced and enjoyed with
gratitude. I sat in a replica of my
teenage bedroom doodling a
prop notebook with the initials
of a boy I liked in 2001,
surrounded by a crew setting
up the shot. I knew this
moment was one of them. ■Ask Dolly anything about Everything
I Know About Love by joining our
Instagram Live at 6pm on Thursday
@theststyle‘The radiators had to
have knickers and socks
hanging off them’
What does it feel like to have your twenties turned into a TV
show? From the gloriously grubby house-share to finding the right
Topshop dresses, it’s been a blast, says Dolly Alderton
Getty Images
Emma
Appleton and
Dolly Alderton
at the launch
of the showThe Sunday Times Style • 19