Dolly Alderton

It is important to have a lot of sex with a lot of people but probably no more than ten.

had spent nearly every day alone with my thoughts. I had pushed away the concerns of my friends and family; I was always on the verge of tears, but I was unable to talk to anyone. I woke up every morning with no idea of where I was or what was happening; I came round to my life every morning like the previous night’s sleep was a punch in the head that left me bloody.

Morrissey once described his teenage life as ‘waiting for a bus that never came’; a feeling that’s only exacerbated when you come of age in a place that feels like an all-beige waiting room. I was bored and sad and lonely, restlessly wishing the hours of my childhood away

She once commented that we sent good new music to each other at a wholesale price, then passed it on to love interests as our own, with an ‘emotional mark-up’

I slowly began to realize that it’s best for those first dates to happen in real life rather than in written form, otherwise the disparity between who you imagine the other person to be and who they actually are grows wider and wider. Many times, I would invent a person in my head and create our chemistry as if writing a screenplay and by the time we’d meet again in real life, I’d be crushingly let down. It was as if, when things didn’t go as I imagined, I’d assumed he would have been given a copy of the script I’d written and I’d feel frustrated that his agent obviously forgot to courier it to him to memorize

When I finally have a boyfriend, little else will matter.

When friends have boyfriends they become boring.

be an empirically attractive young man, you just have to have a nice smile, an average body type (give or take a stone) a bit of hair and be wearing an all-right jumper. To be a desirable woman – the sky’s the limit.

But I knew deep down that I was still morphing myself at the behest of a man’s gaze;

he wore a floor-length wolf fur coat from Russia that belonged to his grandfather and his shirts had labels in them from boarding school.