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I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review Podcast. We've just released our top 10 books of 2024 episode. in which I and several other editors break down the best fiction and nonfiction of the year. You should definitely check that out. Please check that out. It's just a really fun listen. One of those books, Dolly Alderton's Good Material,
was discussed earlier this year as part of our monthly book club episodes, and we wanted to revisit that conversation. So here's MJ Franklin speaking with Emily Akin and Leah Greenblatt. Enjoy. Hello, and welcome to another Book Club episode of the Book Review Podcast. I'm MJ Franklin. I'm an editor here at the New York Times Book Review, and this week we're chatting about Dolly Alderton's latest novel, Good Material.
This is a funny introduction because depending on what type of reader you are or on what side of the Atlantic you are on, Dolly Alderton is either a huge, inescapable cultural phenomenon to you, or she's a writer you've never heard of. Dolly Alderton is the author of several books. First, she had a memoir come out called Everything I Know About Love.
Then she has a novel called Ghosts, and she has a collection of columns called Dear Dolly. And that collection of columns hints at why she's known in the UK, but not necessarily known in the US. Before she became an author, she made a name for herself writing columns for the Sunday Times. First, she had a dating column, and then she pivoted to a general advice column called Dear Dolly.
Those have been running in some form since 2015, and through those columns, she kind of ingrained herself in the British zeitgeist because they were fun and voicey and offered such perspective. But those columns did not run in the U.S., so American readers may be unfamiliar with Bali. That may change with her new book, Good Material, the book we're here to discuss. She's getting a little bit buzzier in the States, and...
Joining me in discussing that book are two great colleagues and readers, people I'm so excited to talk to. First, we have Emily Aiken, a fellow staff editor here at The Book Review. Hi, Emily. Hi, MJ. I'm here representing first-time Dolly Alderton readers. Oh, me too. I'm a first-time Dolly Alderton reader, but our guest, I believe, is not. So we'll talk about scooping the intro. We'll talk about that in a little bit.
You may recognize Emily's voice from other past episodes of the Book Review Podcast. Emily, I believe you were most recently on the Best Books of 2023 episode? That sounds about right. Yeah. You gave that like stirring, very evocative dive into Jonathan Rosen's Best Minds. I love that book. Great, great narrative nonfiction. So thank you for joining us. Also with us is Leah Greenblatt.
Hi, Leah. Hello. How are you doing? So excited to talk about this book. Leah is another editor here at The Book Review. And Leah, I believe this is your first time on the podcast, right? It is. Please be gentle. Always, always. We're amongst friends. We're talking about amongst friends.
Leah is a great reader. I'm always excited to talk with her about books. But also, Leah, you lived in London for a little bit, so you know Dolly Alderton. You have a transatlantic understanding of Dolly Alderton. Yes, I am so international. No, I actually... I was working out of London the summer of 2018 when Everything I Know About Love was out and it was, Dolly was everywhere. And that was my introduction to her was a deep immersion in Dolly.
So you are an expert and I'm going to ask an anxiety question to you, which is, was my setup of Dolly correct? Any notes, any addendums? Tell me more. It was very correct. I would say for... An American audience that she falls maybe somewhere between a Candace Bushnell and maybe a Sloane Crosley, if that makes sense. Okay. Generationally, she's younger than both.
But it's that mix of pop culture relevancy and a little bit elevated, I would say, and a very strong voice, a female voice, a voice that confides a lot. personally and that's what's endeared her she also is this blonde glamazon who's very telegenic and you would see her face everywhere she has this tumble of curls and she's she has a great sort of persona for stuff like this
Perfect. And also, I feel very relieved that I was not totally off base with that intro. I thought it was great. I learned a lot. Phew. Thank you. And she has a busy resume. It's a lot to get to. True. But we're not talking about her entire resume. We are talking about...
specifically the book, Good Material. I'm going to start off, as I am known to do, with a little old plot synopsis, and then I promise I will stop monologuing and we're going to talk about this as a group. I promise. Okay, but plot synopsis. Good material is Dahlia Alderton's riff on the rom-com. I say it's a riff because though this book is humorous and deals with ideas of romance, it's not really about the experience of love.
It's about the experience of a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad breakup. We follow Andy, a 35-year-old straight, white, English comedian who has just been broken up with by his girlfriend, Jen. They have been dating for a few years and the breakup causes Andy to spiral. He's completely lost. That's for a few reasons. First, he doesn't know why Jen broke up with him. She broke up... pretty unexpectedly after a Paris trip and he's wondering what went wrong. Next.
Because he and Jen were living together, he has to find a new place to live, and his chaotic housing hunt leads him to live with a 78-year-old conspiracy theorist named Morris, who happens to be obsessed with Julian Assange. I'm looking across the room, and Emily and Leo are... quietly laughing which I think tells you the tone of this book and I think overall Andy feels like his life is stalling
Through Andy Antispiral, we explore the highs of romance and the low lows of breakups, and we also dive into existential questions like, how do you understand your life as you approach middle age? How do you process, accept, and discuss challenging emotions? What does healing look like? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot of stuff in here. That's a very quick Spark Notes version of this book. Leah, Emily, have I missed anything?
We have to leave a little mystery for our readers, right? I think that's a great synopsis. Thank you for saving me. I think that'll wet people's appetites. Perfect. Well, I'm hoping what it will also let their appetites are just our general thought about this book, which is where I'm going to start. I'm going to start.
Big picture, temperature check. How do you feel about this book? Like it, love it, obsessed with it, things you're still thinking through. I'm going to start with you first, Emily. All right. Let me tell you how I came to this book. I had just finished reading a... 600-page, very important, but extremely bleak history of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, and I needed something.
I needed to laugh. I needed something not quite escapist. I wanted a literary experience, but I wanted a comic novel. And good material was recommended by a colleague. And I thought, huh. not knowing anything about Dolly Alderton. And I got a few pages in and the protagonist was a man. He'd been dumped. And moreover, he was a comedian. And you guys, I thought, well...
This is such a bold move. What an audacious thing to do. This author has decided to make a comedian her protagonist. That's no small pressure to make your protagonist a comedian who has had some success. I mean, he's apparently funny. And the book is money is to make him the straight man in a way. I mean, he's been bruised. He's miserable. He's suffering. And he's surrounded by some crazy people. Truly, truly. Morris. So I want to ask.
you first were like interested and tuned into the fact that you have a comedian. But like overall, how did you feel about this book? You were looking for something funny. Did it satisfy that itch? Tell me your thoughts about this book. By page 40, I was laughing out loud. So one of the things that Andy does is he's wallowing miserably. He moves back in with his mother. I mean, nothing is more humiliating for a 35-year-old man except maybe the balding patch on his head.
But he takes photos. He has this folder on his camera roll of just some bald photos as he anxiously takes. And then makes the mistake of having the photos, the embarrassing photos pop up in inopportune moments for others to see. And he is humiliated all over again. But so one of the things he does while he wallows, I mean, he's crying by the end of the first chapter.
you're crying with him. I mean, you're very moved by him. He's a very appealing guy. He relives, of course, the story of his relationship with Jen. And one of the things you learn early on is that Andy and Jen were best friends with a couple, Avi and Jane.
And together they did all these things. And for Andy, this was bliss. And at one point, this is when I remember first laughing out loud. He said, the four of us together, it wasn't a coup de foudre, but a group de foudre. And I thought that was hilarious. little wordplay but she does Emily loves a French pun it's true I do have a weakness for French puns but and I was totally in what about you Leah how did you feel about this book give me your temperature check your top level thoughts
I think, well, having read Dolly before, I came in expecting more of the same in a good way. What does that mean? Tell me, had you read her fiction, her columns? I had read both. And in fact, the place that I was staying in London just happened to have a copy on the shelf. And that's why I had read her first collection that was very personal and very much about, you know, so I know a little bit more about her background and where she's coming from as a human when obviously she's writing in this.
book about someone very far removed from herself at least gender wise it's a man but it's interesting it's uh not to bring in another pop culture monster that you can't avoid in this conversation but this taylor swift record that just came out Yeah, we were recording the weekend after the Tortured Poets Department. Maybe you've heard of it. Maybe you're familiar.
Taylor Swift has a line on the record that says, all my friends smell like weed or little babies. And Taylor Swift, I think, is 34 years old. And the character in this book is 35. And that is an age, I think, when that's a divide that happens for you, right? He has his comedian friends like Marcus who are messy and still very much enjoying certain substances. And then he has his best friends Avi and Jane.
who have domesticated their houses full of children and lasagna and laundry and this very sort of sweet domesticity, right? And I think what Andy realizes is he doesn't want to be the weed guy. He wants to be the little babies guy. Right? Except that he feels completely abandoned.
suddenly in this relationship, and that kind of spirals him into a crisis about his entire life, his professional life, his friendships. But I think it's partly because, and I believe Dolly is about exactly that age as well. She's mid-30s. It's a very sort of pivotal point for a lot of people. And I think Dolly, as a writer, has taken us on this journey with her since her 20s, if you've read her.
And I actually really enjoyed Ghosts a couple years ago, which was her previous, that was her debut novel. And I've recommended it to a lot of people going through breakups because I think she captures really well the obsessiveness of a breakup. The loops you get into in your head, the sort of replays that you do, the sliding doors of what if I had done this and what if I had made this choice and also just.
The insane second guessing of emotional motivations and all those things where you just can't get out of your own head. Yeah, that's what I really loved about this book personally is... just like the way she captures just that like internal questioning and searching. I'm going to ask you a question, Emily, which is I, so I've been positioning Leah as our Dolly Alderton scholar.
But then also, I'm going to position you as a Dahlia Alderson scholar, too, because you've read this book twice, or you listened to it a few months ago, the audiobook, and then you write the text of it for this podcast. I'm wondering, like...
How did that second reading change how you thought of the book? What's the difference in your mind between the audiobook and the text? Just tell me about reading it multiple times. Well, the audiobook is fantastic. The actor who reads Andy in the audiobook is Arthur. Darvill, a British actor a little older than Andy, maybe 40.
I had not even heard of him. I hadn't either. And I was like quietly pretending like, yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay. But he has the most impeccable comic timing and impersonation talent. He does all the voices. of Andy's friends, Andy's mother, who's a wonderful minor character, even Andy's mother's friend, who I love. It turns out there are a lot of breakups in this book. Everybody has a breakup story to share with Andy. He's at his mother's house and he's out drinking.
and I think it's pretty early in the day and his mother's friend, Debbie, sees him and she's like, oh, that's good. You're drinking at 11. That's what I did when Malcolm dumped me. And Arthur's reading is fantastic. And so to go back and then read the book. Without the audiobook, I could only hear Arthur's voice in my head, which I had no problem with. That's good because I feel like sometimes...
You hear an author's voice in your, or a reader's voice in your head, and you're like, it's distracting. So to have a reader, you're like, I loved it. It enhanced it, and I can't get it away from me in a good way. I love that. Can we ask our host here, MJ, what was your first take on the book? And did you, had you heard of her at all? I had heard of her. I know I've seen her name on like the bestseller list and everything I know about love.
It goes around like book talk every so often. I feel like multiple of her books go around book talk. So I heard of her, but I'd never read any of her books. I hadn't known about her columns. So this is my introduction to Dolly Alderton. And I think I had a weird reading experience. Do tell.
Part of that is that just our jobs, like I feel like we are always being interrupted with our personal reading with work reading. So my first half of reading this was very piecemeal. I would read like a chapter or two and then have to pivot to something else and then come back to it.
And then this past Friday, I just sat, Taylor Swift day, I just sat and I marathoned 200 pages of this book and I was pulled in. So I bring this up to say that I had... a hard time getting into the book one because of how i was reading but then two one of my big challenges with the book is i didn't really connect with andy as a person or a character
Emily, you mentioned that he's like the straight man, even though he's a comedian, he's the straight man amongst all of these like very far-fetched or not far-fetched, but these like very eccentric memorable characters. My challenge with Andy is that I felt like I could feel the seams of like he had to do one particular thing to get the plot to move in this direction or he had to say or think.
a certain thing to get the plot to move in another direction. So for instance, when he's looking for housing, he on a whim does. decides to rent a houseboat without having seen the boat, despite the fact that he hates boats and water. And I'm like, why would you do that? The price. It's the price, MJ. He can't afford anything. But he's doing it for the plot. Yeah, so I was like, he's doing it for the plot.
the plot but like also there like we know so much about like what he hates so why like there was something about that made it feel like yeah it was just plot armor. Though sometimes you make terrible choices during a breakup that are so counterintuitive that you look back and you go, I was in a fug state. This is true. And that was what I was like. But then also like when he's very obviously being catfished or when Morris is conspiracy theorist.
asks him to like give a quote to a newspaper without telling Andy even what he's talking about. And I was like, Andy's a comedian obsessed with his external image. I feel like he would not be making these types of life career choices. based off of what I know about him. So this is all to say, I felt like there was like a little bit of a character incoherence to him that was necessitated because of the plot to get him to these big moments about...
He felt like a doll being positioned on a stage to get to these particular points. Dolly made a doll. Oh my gosh, she didn't. But what got to me, though, is all of those points were brilliant.
I love Dolly Auderton's riffing on love, on romance, on friendship. She has these great, big, like, poignant passages about how something... feels or what's missing what it means to grieve a relationship I'm going to read it later on in the episode spoiler alert but like the our culture passage like sharing our culture with someone else and what that means
I was so moved by it. I was like drawing hearts in my margins and all of that stuff. And that is the part that I really connected with. I loved Dolly Alderman's meditation on relationships. I want to go back to what you just said about how some of the episodes in the novel felt like they were there for the purposes only of plot and there was a kind of plausibility problem for you.
And I guess I'm gullible. I was with Andy, but I also thought about this, MJ, that a breakup, once it's happened, so the book opens, the breakup has happened. That's a situation, not a premise. I mean, there's not, the plot is a brokenhearted man. I mean, it's not much of a plot. And I had to say, watching Dolly work, I felt like she was able to take what was a...
Essentially a static situation. This was a long relationship. This man is not getting over it in a matter of days. The whole book unfolds in six months. He is heartbroken the entire time. And actually give the plot forward momentum. I think that's where...
partially my reading experience of having at first reading it piecemeal and then finally diving in, just sitting, knocking it out, marathoning it. You just get immersed in this person's broken heart, his broken situation. I just didn't feel so connected to Andy. himself as the character, especially because there are such vivid people around him. I loved Sophie, the woman that he dates later on. I loved Jen and Jane.
Morris or his lesbian personal trainer Kelly. Also in a bad breakup. Also in a bad breakup. These characters are so vibrant but then because I don't think that they had the... the weight and onus of moving the plot forward as much i felt like i could just be with them a little bit more but that's just me i don't know
No, I think you're right. I think Andy is an everyman. I think it's interesting what you say about plot, too, because a lot of people have compared Dolly to Nick Hornby and to High Fidelity, which High Fidelity has this almost like... hero's quest right or an anti-hero's quest where he has to go back and go to all these exes and figure out what went wrong and this is in some ways I think this book is an autopsy of one relationship right the body's not quite cold when the book opens and he's
trying to figure out what went wrong. But you also realize he's not going to dig that deep because he's not completely ready for self-examination. So a lot of his blame is external to start with. And that's why it starts with a list of all the things that Jen, his ex. did badly or things that he didn't love about her. And obviously that's him trying to convince himself that his heart isn't broken and that there were flaws in her that of course made it worth it.
ending this relationship even though it wasn't his choice. Yeah, I love that autopsy metaphor because that also feels like a metaphor of what we're doing here. I mean, this book is very vibrant and alive. The relationship has ended. This book is the flourishing. But I love this idea that we're diving in. And we're going to dive in some more, but... But before we get to specifics and kind of jump further, and I think we should take a quick break. We'll be right back.
Hey, it's John Chase. And Mari Uehara. From Wirecutter, the product recommendation service from the New York Times. Mari, it is gift giving time. What's an easy gift for someone like under 50 bucks? In our gifts under 50 list, I really love this watercolor set from Japan. These beautiful, beautiful colors. It's something that kids can do, adults can do. I love that. For all of Wirecutter's gift ideas and recommendations, head to nytimes.com slash holiday guide.
And we're back. This is the Book Review Podcast. I'm MJ Franklin. I'm joined by Emily Aiken and Leah Greenblatt, and we're discussing good material by Dolly Alderton. We just spoke about our general thoughts, our feelings about this book.
big picture. And now we're going to dive into specifics of the book. I mean, we were talking about some specifics before, but now we're really going to get into it. And I guess to start, I have a table clearing, another anxiety question, which is going to be my theme for today.
My question is, how do you situate that in the rom-com oeuvre? I hope I'm saying that word correctly. I'm wondering how you make sense of it, what you connect this book to, what lineage do you find this book to be situated in? Well, I don't know if you want to hear my answer because I wanted to pick up on Nick Hornby. Because High Fidelity was a breakup novel published in 1995, I think. And Bridget Jones' Diary was 1996.
And I feel that this, I think Dolly Alderton is very self-consciously a descendant of those writers. I think she has, as MJ told us, she has a column, a dating column in Britain. I think Helen Fielding had a similar column. And here we are 30 years later. I just think it's, I would love to hear what you guys think about how she's updating the tropes of the kind of breakup novel for a reader in 2024.
Well, I think one thing that does play into this novel well is social media, cell phones, all those things. There are several plot points that revolve around the catfishing that we spoke of. When he's dating this younger girl, Sophie, who's I think meant to represent Gen Z very specifically, she thinks a lot of things that...
Andy does, she'll say cringe, right? And she lives online. He can't understand her Instagram because it's so esoteric. They're like random blurry nude selfies, but paired with the most random captions. millennial he would be posting pictures of avocado toast or whatever would be the cliche for that and so drag him but he feels completely disconnected and that makes him feel out of touch and lost
And he, I don't want to spoil too much, but it doesn't last with Sophie. And he ends up actually really hurting her, even though her whole affect is that she's Teflon and nothing can reach her and he's inappropriate. age-wise for her anyway and it was never going to last but he manages i think to really pierce her a little bit just because he's such a mess he's not able and he's just not he's his heart is not available he's still completely in love with jen i thought it was just fascinating how
Dolly Alderton was writing about social media, about Instagram. Sophie's a girl who will sext Andy a picture of her butt in a thong. And he sees her in the nude in photographs, I think, online before he sees her. naked in real life and it's this like this weird place where the internet we can be naked and vulnerable this kind of weird pseudo intimacy
And he's always, Andy's also always spying on Jen, his ex-girlfriend, and seeing who she's talking to based on her Instagram feeds, even what movies she's watching and what potato chips she's eating. And yet in real life. People are much more protected. So Sophie has all these defenses. She's so much more afraid of being hurt in real life. So it's just, yeah, what do you think of that, MJ? Yeah, I completely agree about the very specific.
new ways and opportunities and approaches. To humiliate yourself. To humiliate yourself. But then also like through social media to obsess, to think differently about yourself. think about the image that you're projecting and the images that you're getting in to stumble into traps again he's like checking in on Jen which he shouldn't be doing but is doing and then he finds out that like Jen is doing similar things with this new guy that she starts dating that
they used to do. And that's a new way of... Torturing yourself. That's a new way of torturing yourself. That's when the Olivia Rodrigo track came in. Deja Vu. I literally wrote that in the margins. Deja Vu by Olivia Rodrigo. Andy, I got the album for you. But also look at the spiral that he goes into with. his ex's new semi-boyfriends, ex-girlfriends. He finds her tax documents or something online from her Australian business or something. The rabbit holes that you can fall down.
The invasions of privacy. Yes. And yet, like, where is privacy? Where are these boundaries? And what does that tell him about Jen's relationship, whatever her new boyfriend's long-ago ex-girlfriend's business dealings are? But those are the things. that you go to those are the coping mechanisms that you can use now. And he, again, is a man without a super structured life because he's a freelance comedian.
And so he has so much time to spiral. And I don't know, I don't know that he would have gone to a library and used his time better if we didn't have these options. But he definitely, it enforces some of the more toxic behavior of a breakup. And that's what I loved about this novel, which is these toxic forces have always been present, always available, whether you're on social media or you're doing something else. There are...
all of these new ways to do these universal bad behaviors after a breakup. What I loved about this, though, is that I felt like it was capturing a very specific millennial online digital approach to breakups. where like the types of information and just the level of access to information that you do and don't want.
are so readily available. So there's not just the breakup in the privacy of your home. There's also the breakup online where you have to actually block somebody so that you're out of their life. And how do you present your breakup to the world? That's another choice that you can make. He turns out to never have a real mastery of social media. In some ways, I feel like this elderly man that he moves in with who has this very strong parasocial relationship with Julian Assange.
In some ways, he just seems like the most comfortable man in the book because he lives such an analog, contentedly analog life with his pen pal Julian. He's also had a breakup. Yeah. Spoiler alert, you find that out later on. He's not just obsessed with Julian Assange, he's in love with Julian Assange, but then you find out later in the book that he was married for, what, eight years?
decades and decades ago we all have our love stories and the wife left him for his brother and so everybody's carrying around this wound that andy is dealing with for the first time even though he's had other relationships this is the one so Well, Andy has these encounters with other exes that are played for comedy and for tragedy.
I think it's a high school girlfriend he goes for and she's just, you must be really going through it because I barely think about us at all. She's completely moved on. And then he runs into an ex that he feels that he hurt. And he says these sort of bizarre things to her and ruins her day in a weird way. But she's really don't worry about it. I'm fine. And I haven't thought of you. And so his flailing just extends to every corner of his universe because.
He's looking for answers to his current predicament and he's trying to find them in all these other areas of his life. And it's not because he's such a mess. None of it is really probably giving him what he's looking for, but it's all part of the journey. One thing I think is interesting is this book's cover, I would say, is neutral. I mean, her name is Dolly. You can't change that. But I wonder how many men did pick this book up.
and whether they would have thought of it any differently if it was Dan Alderton. That's it. Great question. Since it is a male protagonist and it is, you know, in many ways an exploration from a man's point of view. And it's so interesting because you're asking that because Nick Hornby's book, High Fidelity, people applauded and men said.
This is the book that actually depicts men as they really are. This is us. If you want to understand the 90s male, read this novel. But I do think that this is pitched to women readers, don't you think? I think especially considering that her last book was not dissimilar, but from a woman's point of view and in ghosts.
She literally does get ghosted by a guy who seems to be the perfect boyfriend and then just completely vaporizes. And this sort of fills in the outlines of the other side of that. And it humanizes, I think. And one way that it does that really well is a little bit of a spoiler, but it brings in Jen's perspective at the end. And I think it would have been a very different book if it had ended.
on Andy's perspective, even with a coda or some sort of wrap up, we get a completely flipped perspective from Jen. And it's pretty seamless too. There's no like, now we're to Jen or like section heading Jen. It's just like another chapter and you get a list. Andy makes a list of all the things that Jen was not awesome about at the beginning. And then seamlessly in the end of the book.
You just get a list of all the things that Andy wasn't awesome about. And then you get like just another chapter. And then through context clues, you're like, oh, we're in Jen's mind now. And speaking of like perspective and gender, like that seamless flow is really interesting to me.
I'm curious what you all thought about what her perspective offered. Tell me about being a dungeon. I have thoughts about this because this was actually something I did not like. So in the audio book version, Vanessa Kirby. whom you might remember from The Crown, who played Princess Margaret, the young Princess Margaret.
She reads the last, what do you guys think it is, like 25 pages in the novel that are from Jen's perspective, beginning with that, things I don't like about Andy, or it's actually why it's good that Andy and I broke up. I think it's a list. And then you get in a very compressed way, her account of the breakup, why it happened and what her thoughts are now about her life. And Vanessa Kirby reads that part in her crisp.
posh British accent. And there's a kind of chilliness to it. So when I went back and then read the section in the hard copy, I also felt I didn't recognize the gen. in that section from the previous 200 pages, the gen that I had been thinking about through Andy's.
through the prism of Andy's narration. Wait, how so? What was different? She was colder and judgmental. She resented that he cried during movies but hadn't dealt with what she felt was the true sorrow of his life, which is the fact that he was brought up by a single mother and never really... knew his father she just she seemed so petty in her judgments of him she didn't like that
One point they had to babysit a cat and he snuggled with it on the couch, but she did all the caretaking of the cat, changed the litter box and fed it. And I just, it felt so petty after four years together that these were her grievances. I didn't think that the Jen that we knew.
through Andy was judgmental nor that the Andy that we met wasn't deeply sensitive to other people he seems so kind to me I agree, but I feel like that version, that chilly, judgmental version of Jen comes through only in that list that you do make when you're being cruel and you're trying to convince yourself of something to get over someone.
Then we just get into Jen's brain, not through a list, but just following her as she's thinking about the breakup and then what she's doing. And I felt that version of Jen be disciplined and controlled, but also in her own way.
so earnest and like her again so many spoilers but spoiler alert if you've not already left because of spoilers another spoiler alert it's like you find out that jen never thought she wanted to be in a relationship she was always so distanced her time with andy was her great big experiment trying to be with someone and you see in her own way Jen's searching of like what does that mean like what's my relationship to not just Andy but to relationships in general and I felt that
giving her that space was so kind. I actually really liked the section of Jen, both because I like getting into Jen's mind and I liked her as a character, but then also just big picture. I love when books pivot at the end and give you the... mind of the character you've been obsessing about all along and then all in this one last cathartic burst you get them so that happens in
Ulysses James Joyce's Ulysses and it happens in Hernan Diaz's Trust Do also spoiler alert for that book I'm very sorry but like I it's just a narrative structure yeah I love it it's just a narrative structure that I am obsessed with what did you think about Well, I don't want to overstate this thought that I'm about to express, but I do think it's a little bit radical that Dolly has given us a man, a male protagonist who is obsessing about love and family and children.
And then gives us a woman who ultimately is looking for something bigger with her life. Her main priorities are, what does my soul want? What kind of person do I want to be? Do I want to be this person working this corporate job and making money and getting married and doing the things that I'm supposed to do? And we also find out because, again, we're just completely ruining this book for you, but...
Her dad is casually mentioned by Andy at some point and then you find out that his behavior is actually a humongous motivator for her and how she feels about romance. Her father did certain things that really shaped her. and her sort of approach to relationships. And so she becomes much less of a sort of... an opaque person. I wasn't sure if her character was consistent throughout that entire thing. It did feel a little bit like a vehicle for some of Dolly Alderton's thoughts.
But I still, I'm with you in that I love a satisfying denouement that kind of does it. She's not giving us arty and unfinished. She's giving us the satisfaction of a story without giving us a happily ever after. which I think is a very hard trick to pull off. It's not a happily ever after, but it is, it does pivot to like, that humorous tone falls away and it becomes so earnest and almost saccharine in a way that I think would have annoyed me in other books, but like in this one.
I was there. I was so with her. I do think that the end did something solve a structural problem for Alderton, which is, and this is another spoiler, we learn at the end, after six months of wallowing. and his career tanking, Andy writes a new set. And this set is performed at the end of the book. And that's the end of Andy's narration.
And rather than have the reaction to this set that is a breakthrough for Andy, and it comes at an urgent moment in his career where he's really going to fail out of this profession or he needs a breakthrough, we get... We get his performance without getting a lot of detail, but we get the reaction to it through Jen's eyes. And I felt structurally that was really smart. She's in the audience. And of course, this set, you've already guessed this, even if you haven't read the book.
is about their breakup. And we realize that the good material of the title... is the story we've been reading. And that is the comedy routine, of course, transposed for the stage. And I love that. So that, in fact, Jen gives him this incredible gift. professionally by breaking up with him, which is the material for his next act. And I'm spoiling everything. Well, happy people don't make good comedians. You heard it here first.
But speaking of happy people, good comedians, breakups, we're going to be diving into some of our favorite breakup books in just a second. But before I pivot, I want to ask you, Emily, Leah, are there any last things you want to touch on really quickly about this book? I'll just say one more thing about the title, which I really love because I feel like it's her and Leah, you'll correct me if I'm wrong, is that she does a lot of wordplay.
Okay, readers, this is not just a conventional relationship novel. There's a lot going on at the level of the sentence, which I enjoyed. And so, of course, good material isn't just the comedian's fodder for the set. The question of, is he good material? Is he husband material? Is he material worthy of a relationship, a marriage? And it all comes together. And I just wanted to throw that out there because I did like that. Is he worthy of a novel?
True. Good question. One of the gifts that Dolly Alderton has and why she's a phenomenon, at least on one side of the pond, is what every really good writer does, which is take universal experiences and make them specific and the other way around. And I think... If you've gotten to this point in your life, you've probably had a breakup or two. And there's just some very universal truths in this book that cross, I think, gender and culture and a lot of other sort of boundaries because...
And I also do really like that this book in many ways is about friendship as the most important relationship. And I think so much of Andy's heart. is the real estate is taken up by his male friendships and these sort of quirky other friendships that he develops with a roommate or his relationship with his mother so I like that she's not I would say just
a love person. In the romantic sense, I think she's love on a wider canvas. I completely agree. And I was looking back at the New York Times book review of this book, and a reviewer pointed that out as well. I have it. written down. Are you telling me that's not an original thought, M-Day?
Both can be true. It's original and also our reviewer Katie Jan Baker says, Alderton excels at portraying non-romantic intimate relationships with tenderness and authenticity. And I feel like that's what I got.
That's a much better and quicker way of getting at my point. So thanks to our critic. That's yes. But I agree. Before we pivot, I almost forgot. Can I say the one thing that quote that I loved about our culture and subcultures? I'm just going to read it. Please do. I want people to hear her voice.
I got so sentimental and just like, again, hearts and stars and all that stuff. Andy is thinking about what it means that now he doesn't have this relationship with Jen, what it means that he can't share stuff with his favorite person. and I'm going to skip around, but just roughly the passage goes, it's weird not being in our subculture of two anymore.
There was Jen's culture, and then there was my culture, and then we met and fell in love, and we introduced each other to all of it, like children showing each other their favorite toys. That instinct never goes. Look at my fire engine. Look at my vinyl collection. Look at all these things I've chosen to represent who I am. It was fun to find out about each other's self-made cultures and make our own hybrid in the years of eating, watching, reading, listening, sleeping, and living together.
But I'm not a member of that culture anymore. No one is. It's been disbanded, dissolved. The domain is no longer valid. So what do I do with all this stuff? Where do I put it all? Where do I take all my new discoveries now that I'm no longer in a tribe of two? And if I start a new subgenre of love with someone else, am I allowed to bring in all the things I love from the last one? Or would that be weird? Why do I find all of this so hard?
For me, I love this passage because it's not about just Jen and the breakup. It's like this internal, who am I now? Like, how, what is my life? I get goosebumps still thinking about it, but I just love that passage. I find it so moving. Yeah, it's about real intimacy, right? And when you lose that person, you are a lonely astronaut. Yep. And on that lonely astronaut note, let's talk about other lonely astronauts.
Inspired by this breakup and good material, I was wondering what are some of your other favorite breakup books? These are either books that are dedicated specifically to a breakup like a material. Or these are books that are about something completely different, but they feature a great breakup.
A few weeks ago in another podcast book club discussion, we discussed Miss Havisham, for instance, from Great Expectations, which is certainly not a breakup book. I love that breakup and how even all these years later, Miss Havisham is like, I'm still mad. My own apartment. Exactly. So that's to say that what we mean by breakup book is very flexible, but I'm curious, what are some of your favorites? I'm going to start with you, Emily.
Aren't we glad Miss Havisham didn't have an Instagram account? Can you imagine that cake on Instagram? I would be obsessed. Me too. Well, let's see. I was thinking I don't read a lot of novels where breakups are a central feature, but I did just read one. I can't say it's my favorite. It's a book about which I have very complicated mixed feelings, and it's Kairos.
By Jenny Erpenbeck, the German novelist who is a perennial Nobel longlister. She may win one of these days. She's, I think, still in her 50s. She's still writing. She's published several books now in English. They've been translated. Kairos, which came out in English last year, is now on the shortlist for the International Booker Prize for Fiction in Translation. And the title comes from the Greek god...
of fortunate moments or good fortune, but this isn't an uplifting book. This isn't a comic novel like Jolly Alderton. This is... A novel of an obsessive but doomed love affair between a 19-year-old East German girl and a 55-year-old married East German man. And you know from the outset that it won't end well. It's mesmerizing in the way that getting inside an obsessional relationship can be, but it's also off-putting, it's intense.
But it's also beautiful. She's a beautiful writer. Dwight Garner called it a beautiful bummer of a book in his review. And I thought that sort of summed it up. It's really, it's a lot. That sounds perfect. I'm adding that to my list. What about you, Leah? You know, I thought of a couple titles. One more recent book I really enjoyed was Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation. I thought was really good. That's an Irish, I believe she's Irish writer. It was maybe about two years ago.
She had another novel out a couple months ago on a different topic. Got it. Yes. But this was, it seemed. I would say like autofiction, and it was about a sort of obsessive love affair, not a ton of humor, but a lot of insight into sort of the way you lose yourself in a relationship and how you claw that back.
And Emily and I were also talking about this before, how in some ways I think books like Good Material are the Rodney Dangerfield of fiction. They don't really get any respect. And it actually takes so much skill. to put a book like this, to capture this kind of lightness with heft to it, that sort of weird dichotomy, and heartburn Nora Ephron to me, because I think...
Nora Ephron made films, right, that captured this stuff so well. And it's not until you see a bad romcom that you realize how many ways it can go so terribly wrong. So I think those were two books that I thought of. And I also thought of the film, The Worst Person in the World, which came out a couple of years ago. And I believe it's a Danish production, but it's a really similar sort of exploration.
of just that dance you do with someone of wanting to be completely loved and understood and also so badly wanting to be your own person. Obviously, Heartburn is about a true story of a person that we know, and we've also seen it played out on screen by Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, and that's more of like a cultural sort of touchstone. But all of these things combined give you that.
That insight into smart, damaged people and how we all mess up at love. I am so glad you mentioned Nora Ephron because Dolly Alderton thanks Nora Ephron. That's so interesting. When Nora Ephron wrote Harry Met Sally, she interviewed Rob Rainer, who had just been divorced from his wife, Penny Marshall. And Nora Ephron wanted to get Harry. down as a character who was a plausible man in midlife. And so anyway, Dolly Alderson apparently said to herself,
I have to do this too for Andy and interviewed all her male friends. So Andy is her Harry. Andy is her Harry. I love this. I love this. I have a breakup book. It's not fiction. It is a memoir. It's Splinters by Leslie Jameson. I loved this book. This book is devastating. So this book follows Leslie Jamison's life over the course of a few years in which she got pregnant, had a baby, went through a divorce, then...
The pandemic started. So living through a pandemic, started another relationship and just, it's so specific and so vivid about what she was going through. And then she pans out and she starts making these beautiful statements about love. and romance, and heartbreak, and then just survival. How are you during this time of calamity, both...
personal and societal with the pandemic. I have one quick passage that I'm going to read, which actually relates to the passage that I read from Good Material. It's very similar about subcultures, but she says about her breakup. Our thing, we had a thousand things like everyone, but ours were ours. Who will find them beautiful now? And that question after a breakup, who will find them beautiful now?
Her ex is writing a book, Charles Buck, so we'll see what he found beautiful. Good luck, Charles. Godspeed. I wish everyone the best. You're so magnanimous. Oh my gosh. On that note, I think that's all we have time for today. Emily, Leah, I just want to say a huge thank you for this conversation. This was so fun. It was such a pleasure. So much fun. This book was a pleasure. I hope other people get to enjoy it. It's a nice sort of...
Palette cleanser almost because life is hard. This book is easy. I also want to say a huge thank you to everybody for tuning in and joining these conversations. These book clubs are experiments and I love doing them and we want to hear from you. If you have thoughts about these book clubs, if you have thoughts about this book, if you have thoughts about this conversation, when this goes up on your podcast feeds, this will also go up in an article page on the New York Times.
Comment to the comment section there, leave a thought, and we'll respond to some. So we hope to hear from you, but I just want to say thank you to Leah and Emily, and until next time, happy reading. That was MJ Franklin, Emily Akin, and Leah Greenblatt in our book club episode from earlier this year, speaking about... Dally Alderton's good material. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thank you for listening.