In Search of Good Material

The following is a review of Dolly Alderton’s Good Material.

This year, one of my goals has been to cultivate community with my city. Not in the hyper performative “finding my tribe” sort of way the internet likes to package things, but quietly, through routine.

I’ve started paying more attention to the places that make up the architecture of my weeks: the coffee shops I write in, the bodega that knows my order, where I get my Tuesday night tacos, my Friday night burger, my Sunday morning bagel. Inevitably, this instinct extended itself to books. I wanted a bookstore in the same way some people want a neighborhood bar. A place that could become part of the rhythm of my life.

There’s a Barnes & Noble not far from me, but an early spring book purchase solidified my allegiance to McNally Jackson. Specifically the Soho location which, yes, feels almost offensively on brand for me, and for this blog.

The affair began on a rainy afternoon in early April. I walked into the store with a very specific objective: to find something as funny as Emily Henry’s Funny Story, but a touch less saccharine. In other words, something emotionally intelligent but still indulgent.

I drifted through the staff recommendation tables pretending to browse casually while internally feeling increasingly committed to leaving with something worthwhile simply because I had ventured out in the rain. Eventually, in the spirit of both efficiency and community building, I asked a bookseller for help.

I explained what I was looking for and she immediately smiled in a way that suggested she already had an answer prepared before I’d even finished speaking. She guided me toward the back of the store, reached for a book in the middle column of a shelf, then turned slightly and asked, “Have you read Dolly Alderton?”

Now.

To ask me if I had read Dolly Alderton in the spring of 2026 was almost intimate. Everything I Know About Love had already embedded itself so deeply into my internal monologue that at least once a month I find myself quoting it, referencing it, or mentally assigning passages of it to people in my life. Good Material had accompanied me through the final miserable stretch of a 75 Hard challenge during one particularly bleak February where my personality consisted primarily of walking, boiled sausages, and 21st century capitalism’s favorite word…resilience.

But there was no elegant way to explain any of this without sounding clinically attached to a British woman I’ve never met, so instead I just nodded. Calmly. Casually. As if Dolly and I were mere acquaintances.

“Then you’ll love this,” she said.

A bold statement.

Still, there was something about the confidence with which she said it that made me trust her immediately. She refused to explain the plot and instead insisted I experience it “properly,” which felt slightly annoying but ultimately chic of her. All I knew was that it was fiction, written by someone whose voice I already trusted, recommended by a bookstore that had begun to feel warm in a way increasingly few places do.

So I bought it.

At checkout, another bookseller asked if I wanted to join the membership program. There was apparently a tote involved, along with some percentage off purchases, though I genuinely could not tell you the details because by then the decision had already been made. They were trying to sell me a membership while I was mentally trying on the identity of “woman with local bookstore allegiance.” Entirely different conversations.

And so for the next week, my constant companion became Andy: a balding English man in his mid-thirties unraveling after heartbreak in a tiny London flat.

What makes Good Material so effective is that it never performs intelligence for the reader. It is observational in a way that feels effortless. On the surface, it’s a breakup novel. Underneath, it’s really about humiliation, ego, loneliness, friendship, gender, and the deeply embarrassing reality that sometimes love ends without anyone being especially evil. Just incompatible. Or tired. Or incapable of meeting each other correctly.

Andy himself is occasionally insufferable, often hilarious, and painfully recognizable. Dolly Alderton writes male loneliness with a degree of tenderness that almost catches you off guard. One paragraph would have me reflecting on emotional asymmetry in relationships and the next would have me laughing at a man eating shredded cheese out of a refrigerator at two in the morning. Which, honestly, is how most real heartbreak unfolds anyway. Equal parts existential devastation and complete loss of dignity.

I read most of the novel in coffee shops downtown while New York hovered in that strange transitional phase between winter and spring. The city still looked grey. Everyone wore trench coats and carried umbrellas they kept forgetting in restaurants. There’s something about reading a good breakup novel while the seasons are changing that makes you feel briefly cinematic instead of mentally ill.

And somewhere between the bookstore recommendation, the membership signup, and Andy’s various emotional crises, I realized that what I had actually been searching for that rainy afternoon was not simply another good book. I was searching for ritual. For familiarity. For places that make a city feel smaller and softer around the edges.

Adulthood, at least in New York, can become frighteningly transactional if you let it. Efficient. Isolated. Entire weeks pass where every interaction is optimized for convenience. Order ahead. Tap card. Headphones in. Move along.

But there is something deeply luxurious about being known somewhere. About a bookseller remembering what you like. About returning often enough that a place begins to hold versions of you inside it.

So yes, I joined the membership. And yes, I will probably continue overpaying for hardcovers in Soho while cheaper options exist literally everywhere else. But I suspect that community, like most beautiful things, is partially built through repetition and partially through delusion. And at the moment, I’m committed to both.