I’m not a nonfiction reader by any stretch of the imagination, but I do work in a bookstore, which means that I’m aware of nonfiction bestsellers even if I have no interest in reading them. Dolly Alderton’s self-help memoir Everything I Know About Love has been flying off the shelves, so I was intrigued when my book club selected her novel Good Material. Hooray! A way to experience a popular writer without having to dive into nonfiction! Like most book club picks, Good Material was not one I would necessarily have picked up on my own; however, once I was told to read it it looked interesting enough. I was even more intrigued when I found out that Arthur Darvill (Rory from Doctor Who) and Vanessa Kirby (Margaret from The Crown) read the audiobook. Of course, my library hold for the audiobook didn’t come through in time and I ended up reading a physical copy, but those high profile names attached were still a selling point for me.
What’s it about?
Andy’s girlfriend Jen dumped him apparently out of the blue. Andy, who is a thirty-five-year-old unsuccessful comedian who is losing his hair, is deeply daunted by the thought of starting over. He’d assumed he and Jen would get married and have children together, and finds himself spiraling.
What’d I think?
I actually loved this book, possibly because—like Andy—I am a wannabe creative in my thirties who hasn’t yet made it work. I am also—like Jen—someone who is perfectly comfortable single but feels the loneliness of all their closest friends pairing off. This was an interesting book to discuss with my particular book club. Everyone else in the group is a woman at least a decade older than me; all of them either are married or have been, and most of them have children. All of them, even those who liked the book, struggled to relate to Andy. We spent a lot of our discussion trashing Andy for how miserable and whiny he is. Seventy-five percent of the novel is in Andy’s POV as he wallows in emotional pain without any helpful conduits, and many people in the group said they enjoyed the book only in the last bit, when Jen takes the stage to tell her side of the story.
Maybe I should say that they spent a lot of the discussion trashing Andy. I spent that time not admitting how much of myself I saw in him. I’m a millennial who recently turned thirty. It’s hard out there! Everyone does expect you to more or less have things figured out. Most of my friends and peers are coupled up and working impressive enough jobs that they’re not embarrassed to answer when asked what they do. When I actually do say what I do, the immediate follow up question is an awkwardly hedged, “and what are you looking to do next?” because I work in retail, and that’s where the underachievers, dropouts, and burnouts wind up, I guess. There’s an invisible cutoff with creative endeavors. If you’re a teenager or a twenty-something who says you’re writing a book or working to be a stand-up comedian, you’re seen through a lens of potential. Once you’re thirty, it shifts: if you haven’t succeeded yet, it’s time to get some real career ambitions. It’s time to have a real job. And maybe I’m more selfish than the rest of the people in the group, but I absolutely relate to the woe-is-me wallowing after a major setback. I think—or maybe assume, because I do—that everyone gets deeply self-involved when heartbroken. Sure, I’ve never hired a therapist under a false name and false pretenses, but I definitely have moped around feeling sorry for myself. I’m pretty sure if I settled down with someone I assumed was the love of my life only to get unexpectedly dumped, I would hyperfocus on my failures and misery for at least as long as Andy does.
I was the only one who related to Andy, but some of the others recognized him. Most of us agreed that he is absolutely the sort of tortured artist many comedians are behind closed doors, and one woman in the group—aside from me the only single one, and the only one who is braving the dating world—said that she has met many self-involved Andy-types out there. It was kind of funny how much of the conversation would go with one person saying “I don’t believe anyone would xyz,” me thinking okay but in that situation I probably would and the single woman saying “I have multiple stories about men doing that exact thing, and worse.”
The way that Alderton tackles the socialization of the different sexes is extremely compelling. As we see repeatedly throughout the novel, Andy’s friends—all men—don’t support him emotionally the way that Jen’s friends—all women—do for her. While Jen gets whisked away for a weekend of emotional unwinding, Andy’s friend Avi has to all but threaten the guys to get together for Andy to have drinks one night. Once they’re there, they barely talk about Jen or the immense upheaval Andy has just suffered. In our society, men aren’t supposed to cry, aren’t supposed to talk about their feelings. They’re supposed to man up and get on with it. It’s one of the most obvious and damaging way that misogyny hurts men. In discussion, one of my book club ladies was annoyed with Andy’s wallowing and said that when she was in similar situations “I’d call up my girlfriends to talk and then I’d get over it.” Exactly! For want of a better word, Andy doesn’t have any girlfriends he can talk things out with. He has no healthy outlet for his sadness, so he turns to unhealthy outlets like drinking instead. Even Andy, who knows just how much emotional support is needed after this sort of upheaval, is unable to overcome a lifetime of masculine programming when one of his friends goes through the same sort of traumatic breakup. The best he can do is write a letter.
Jen eventually gets her own side of the story, and I love what Alderton does with her as well. After so long with Andy, it would be easy to make Jen into a villain or a one-dimensional ex, but she’s as well-developed as Andy is. I absolutely love that Jen legitimately does want to live a single, childfree life. I never run into characters with that opinion who stick to it. It’s always they say it until they meet the right guy or they say it and then get pregnant and decide kids are what they wanted all along. Jen is out there living her life, feeling the same social pressures as I and every other young person is. She tried the relationship thing and she even liked it, but in the end she decided it wasn’t for her and didn’t let anyone shame her out of it. I can’t even begin to explain how affirming and refreshing that is, particularly because Jen’s friends and family don’t tell her she is wrong or broken for feeling that way. It’s also written so well. There’s a section when Jen’s final single-and-childfree friend gets pregnant and Jen feels helplessly lonely. It’s then that she looks for a partner and finds Andy, because she feels entirely left out by all her friends who have crossed an invisible line to another life. I read this book shortly after meeting my sister’s first boyfriend. Even though I love my sister-in-law now, when my brother got together with her at the end of his college career, I was a little sad because it felt like he’d moved into a different phase of life, one that was farther away from the original family. Now my sister is seeing someone also and I was surprised by how crushingly lonely that made me feel. I’ve always been very comfortable about being single, so much so that I usually don’t even think enough about it to bother categorizing myself as “single,” but in the first couple weeks of that information, I found myself thinking wow, maybe I do want a partner, not because it’s something I actively feel like I’m missing but because it feels like I’m suddenly the last one left in an empty clubhouse.
The whole book’s psychology is fascinating, and the book club also confirmed what I suspected while I was reading Good Material: single millennials will relate to it the most, and the farther you get from that experience/demographic, the less it will strike you. Having read it, I am unsurprised by the success of Alderton’s memoir/self-improvement title. She clearly has a strong grasp on internal lives and society’s pressures, and does a fantastic job of making it all both painfully funny and relatable.
Very little happens in Good Material from a plot perspective. Someone mentioned spoilers at the meeting and I was like “what is there in this book that could possibly be spoiled?” It’s all about Andy’s emotional growth and his journey towards his next steps. There’s not a huge question as to what his next steps will be or should be. From the outside, they’re obvious: use this painful breakup as good material for your comedy routine, to make it both more personal and universal than joking about paninis, and stop living as if you’re biding your time before Jen comes crawling back. The reader can see what needs to happen, and so can literally everyone else. It is all about the journey to get there. It’s a highly entertaining journey. Andy’s standup might be painfully unfunny (a critic calls him the death of comedy, basically), but his story isn’t. The whole book club, even those who disliked the book generally and hated Andy specifically, roared with laughter as we recounted his ridiculous exploits. Alderton does such a great job with the internal life of her characters. It feels so deeply real, and she pulls off a feat that not all authors are capable of: she keeps the reader deeply within Andy’s POV while still allowing room for objectivity. There are no gaps in Andy’s narration, and his actions all have a sort of internal logic that can be understood, related to, and empathized with… but at the same time the reader can see very plainly that this is a man who is wallowing in the deep end, and that the writer knows it. A poorly written book might seem like it is justifying its characters’ worst actions (yes, I the author agree with what this character is saying) or losing its grip on the narrative voice to get its thesis through (you might be wondering why I the character would be doing something as stupid at this). Alderton makes it look easy, and as an unsuccessful thirty-year-old writer I can say confidently: it is not easy.
What’s the verdict?
Good Material surprised me. I suspected that it would be difficult for me, a person who generally dislikes romance books and is largely uninterested in romance in real life, to relate to or care much about a novel deeply concerned with the ins and outs of a romantic relationship. To my surprise, though, the book is far more than just a novel about a couple who didn’t make it. With insight and humor, it dives deeply into the societal norms that can make modern life—particularly modern life for an almost-middle-aged millennial—particularly difficult. While telling an entertaining, character-driven story, Good Material dives into the rift between men and women’s emotional support structures, the loneliness of atypical life choices, and the pressures to have it all put together (in a particular way) by a particular age. The voice is confident and funny, and it is emotionally very refreshing and compelling. This is far from my usual fare, but I highly enjoyed it and would enthusiastically recommend it.
What’s next?
If you liked how Jen leaves her relationship unapologetically and lives her life without making herself feel small because of the men around her, you might like Half-Blown Rose by Leesa Cross-Smith. There’s an artistic element in this one as well, but it is about a woman regaining her power after her husband, with whom she has children, betrays her. It is also similar to Good Material in that, while I liked it a lot, my book club did not.
Want another story about a man floundering and rediscovering himself during a midlife crisis after a failed relationship? Less by Andrew Sean Greer, which is a Pulitzer-winning gay odyssey, might be up your alley.
If you liked that Good Material presents a loving romantic relationship that ends but is no less significant for that, you might enjoy Out of Love by Hazel Hayes, which tracks an ultimately unsuccessful romance in reverse.
Want to read another novel about a mid-thirties man who has not yet made anything of his life and starts to spiral for it? You might enjoy The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade, which is an intergenerational novel largely centered on a man who had not taken control of his life, and which examines societal expectations across gender lines.
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