She’s fine, she hates you, her Zumba class are plotting your death.’ Another arctic pause. ‘She’s devastated, obviously.’ Annoyingly loquacious and was on a debating team at her school, which meant I didn’t win an argument in nearly four years even when I was right about loads of them. Then I realize: half of them were single four and a half years ago. None of them are now. Closer to fifty than twenty." She’s sworn she won’t, but she can’t keep it up much longer,’ she says. ‘He’s your best friend. He can help you process this.’ The End of the Affair. I didn’t read any Graham Greene until I was 30 and I fell in love with his writing.

She conjures up some plausible maxims, too, enlightening readers about “The Flip” (the change in power that occurs in every relationship doomed to failure) or the 90/10 rule (rebounders will invariably gravitate to people who embody the crucial 10% that was missing in their otherwise fine exes). I award it 13/10 on my QWJ scale (stands for Queasy With Jealousy that I didn't write it)’ MARIAN KEYES Would take an hour to go to bed, no matter what time she got in, because she’d do a seven-step skincare routine, browse shopping apps and listen to podcasts. And yet only left twenty minutes from her alarm going off to having to leave the flat in the morning. No, I’m not,’ she says. One of our favourite jokes, extinguished along with our relationship. We were only allowed to make it when we were in cahoots; when we were so close that her family felt like my family, even though they drove me mad. But she’d crossed over now. I’m not her family any more, we are no longer playing for the same team. I am just a man from the Midlands who she would probably never be friends with, being rude about her sister. Once overheard her say ‘Let’s grab a cappuccino some time and we’ll talk’ to my teenage cousin who wanted advice about his university applications.His lovelorn misadventures will prove to be the making of him but the novel closes with a short section told from Jen’s point of view. It’s a clever way of tying up loose ends that also accentuates the extent to which this affable, satisfying tale is out to defy some of the most stubbornly conservative tropes of romantic fiction. My therapist suggested I do something this week that I found helpful, and I think you’d find it helpful too.’ Dolly Alderton is the only woman I have ever encountered that writes women’s fiction without hating women. By this I mean, this book is written mostly from the perspective of a man grieving a horrific breakup that, in all honestly, would drive nearly anyone into a deep, dark madness that they may/may not ever completely recover from. But the most compelling part of this story is that Dolly manages to take the reader through the mania, the bargaining, and the desperation of searching for control in a situation that you did not choose to be in, and she does it without making us hate the woman who has caused the breakup. Good Material introduces us to stand-up comedian Andy, whose life is going okay. His career hasn't really taken off and when his girlfriend breaks up with him for reasons that don't make sense to him ("she wants to be single"), he ends up living out of a suitcase in his best friend's spare room, trying to process what happened to his life and asking himself the scary question of whether he shouldn't have figured it all out by now, aged 35.

One of the foremost ‘it’ writers of our time . . .Whatever ails you, Alderton can fix it with her intimate wisdom . . . There is no writer quite like Dolly Alderton working today and very soon the world will know it.” The book is so easy to read and still feels profound and relatable in its revelations. I consider being able to pull this off incredibly hard and Dolly Alderton did it without ever drifting off into either pretentious, patronising or unrealistic territory. And despite us all probably having read at least a dozen novels about some sort of breakup, I thought there was enough in here to make this feel fresh – particularly the rumination about being in your thirties. All talk about being some big adventurer but never followed through. Wanted to take a year off to travel because she never had a gap year (‘next year’). Wanted to move to Paris (‘not the right time’). Wanted to get an undercut (‘work wouldn’t like it’). Wanted to go to an outdoor sex-themed rave (‘when my hay fever gets better’). Good Material contains a lot that will resonate with anyone who has experienced a difficult breakup – bumping into your ex with their new partner and hoping the ground will swallow you whole; storing up the things you want to tell them – but ventures into enough other areas to have a broad appeal.Just as she did in both her memoir and her 2020 debut novel Ghosts, Alderton explores friendships beautifully, probing the anxieties around being left behind while other friends reach milestones, and the bittersweet pain of seeing a friend’s career soar while your own is flailing (“I’m pleased for him,” Andy notes when spotting a five star review of a fellow comic’s show. “I can’t read past the fourth sentence”). When she would go for a run in the evening she would come into the living room, stretch in front of the TV and say ‘What’s this?’ and make me explain the programme I was watching even though she knew what it was, just to make a point that she was exercising while I was watching Help, I’m a Hoarder!