Dolly Alderton - Ghosts (2020)

to ghost someone = “the act or practice of abruptly cutting off all contact with someone (such as a former romantic partner) usually without explanation by no longer accepting or responding to phone calls, instant messages, etc.”¹

In this case the Ghosts of the title is also referring to a father losing memories due to dementia, and the protagonist losing her old friendships to their marriages and babies.

My friend referred to it as my sex-and-the-city-novel, and I couldn’t describe it better, it’s all about navigating early adult life, believing or not in marriage and love, about ex boyfriends and dating, about being in your early 30s going out and drink and buying your first house and the anxiety of building a future for you and not getting any younger again. Understandably at this stage of life we sometimes feel still like a child and hesitate with certain decisions or struggle with responsibilities. Notably it’s mostly the men in the novel that are selfish, childish, a bit careless and not even honest about it with themselves.

It is clearly a book written for young women. The main character Nina George Dean just bought her first own flat in London Archway, and is back to dating after her long term relationship broke up. As a first person narrator she is retelling the events that happened in her life between her 32^nd to her 33^rd birthday, the “strangest year of her life”, which to me personally didn’t feel very strange or extraordinary at all. Her name is associated with George Micheal, who’s song was top of the charts when she was born.

Nina works a kitchen book writer publishing her own books, sufficiently successful as to be able to live from it. She published a book called “Taste”, a second one “The tiny kitchen”, and is now starting her third one, weirdly she chats with her editor about her personal life, I don’t know if this is common. She used to be a English teacher like her father, in fact she is very close to her Dad, who has dementia and is deteriorating which is a very difficult condition to witness and accompany.

Nina’s ex boyfriend Joe now has a new girlfriend, she and Joe were together for 7 years, now she has been single for 2. So, Nina decides it’s time to download a dating app and starts dating again. She starts going out with Max, 37, tall, masculine, surfer type, accountant, a bit insecure or at least introvert. They fall in love, but after 3 months of relationship Max disappears all of a sudden.

A lot of the novel is just reciting stereotypes. Nina and her friends talk about how friends and their wives behave, men want to impress, girls want to make friends. Lola is her only single friend, a yoga girl with eccentric taste clothing, always drinking prosecco or wine, talking probably about astrology (I don’t remember) a dating expert. A fun character, the Samantha of Sex and the City.

Katherine is her oldest friend, now married with children and moving to the suburbs with little time or comprehension for her childless friends. Nina also has to handle a strange new neighbour in her building who doesn’t respect anything of basic conviviality rules.

She has always had a difficult relationship with her mother who seems a hateful selfish person, with not much of personality anyway. This is put on a further strain with her Dad’s health issues.

So this is it, not much else happens. Nina is looking for meaning in life, in the decisions made y the people around her, but instead she finds mostly only pragmatism or convenience which disappoints her, but doesn’t make her lose her optimism.

I don’t regret reading Ghosts, but the characters are a bit flat, the plot a bit short, and it straight out bored me. It’s not really bad, but definitely not good either. I found it hard to identify myself in any of the characters, even as a woman in my (late) 30s. I can't relate to this life personally, I have very few couples among my friends who actually got married and going to the pubs and drink is a thing that I left in my 20s. I also know very few people who still celebrate their birthdays is their 30s with cake and invitations and their parents and all. Nina listens to female serial killer podcasts, the kind of “true crime” (the worst category of podcast, in my opinion this makes her even more pathetic). The narrator starts the novel announcing “The strangest year of her life” which makes you want to read it, but in the end to me it looked like a pretty event-less year except for the father’s health deteriorating.

Looking at the cover it becomes clear to me that I normally wouldn’t have chosen to buy this book, but I had read a nice recommendation somewhere and made an effort to not judge it by its cover.

Not really funny, not deep, not really emotional, but very readable, however a bit boring and predictable. The kind of book you can read with half of your brain switched off, just to wind down before sleeping.

1https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ghosting