Zeerak J.P.

“You know when you were a teenager and you’d see your mum with her best friends and they’d seem close, but they weren’t like how you were with your friends? There’d be a strange formality between them – a slight awkwardness when they first met. Your mum would clean the house before they came and they would talk about their children’s coughs and plans for their hair. When we were kids, Farly once said to me: ‘Promise we’ll never get like that. Promise when we’re fifty we’ll be exactly the same with each other. I want us to sit on the sofa, stuffing our faces with crisps and talking about thrush. I don’t want to become women who meet up once every couple of months for a craft fair at the NEC.’ I promised. But little did I know how much work it takes to sustain that kind of intimacy with a friend as you get older – it doesn’t just stick around coincidentally.”

Excerpt From
Everything I Know About Love
Dolly Alderton
This material may be protected by copyright.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“When you begin to wonder if life is really just waiting for buses on Tottenham Court Road and ordering books you’ll never read off Amazon; in short, you are having an existential crisis. You are realizing the mundanity of life. You are finally understanding how little point there is to anything. You are moving out of the realm of fantasy ‘when I grow up’ and adjusting to the reality that you’re there; it’s happening. And it wasn’t what you thought it might be. You are not who you thought you’d be.
Once you start digging a hole of those questions, it’s very difficult to take the day-to-day functionalities of life seriously. Throughout my twenty-fifth year, it was as if I had created a trench of my own thoughts and unanswerable questions, and from the darkness I peered up, watching people care about the things I had cared about: haircuts, the newspaper, parties, dinner, January sales on Tottenham Court Road, deals on Amazon – and I couldn’t fathom climbing out and knowing how to immerse myself in any of it again.”

Excerpt From
Everything I Know About Love
Dolly Alderton
This material may be protected by copyright.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“If words are dead ends, then metaphors are doors that I can try to open up. When you compare pain to another thing, those that are listening can fill in the abstraction with their own interpretations. My friend’s pain was a bowling ball and mine is something like a tarantula who’s using my body as her nest. I can feel her pulling up my oesophagus, the lump of her body balancing at the edge of my throat. I swallow her down, but eight legs means she works her way back up again quickly. Fighting the pain is tiring, so eventually I fall asleep and when I wake up there are a few delicious seconds of quiet when I’ve forgotten what’s happened. But then I feel the bristle of her legs scraping against the pink smoothness of my gut and I remember. It seems like a fault of nature that my unconscious mind could be so cruel.
Maybe now that I can explain the pain a bit more, those who hear me will share in that feeling? Take some of it away with them?”

Excerpt From
Notes on Heartbreak: The must-read book of 2022
Annie Lord
This material may be protected by copyright.”
― Annie Lord, Notes on Heartbreak

“The transitional state of a long journey has always seemed to me the most romantic and magical of places to find yourself in; marooned in a cosy pod of your own thoughts, suspended in mid-air, travelling through a wodge of silent, blank pages between two chapters. A place where phones dip in and out of consciousness and you’re forced to spend time with your thoughts, working out what needs to be reshaped and reordered. ”

Excerpt From
Everything I Know About Love
Dolly Alderton
This material may be protected by copyright.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love