Audiobooks Like Everything I Know About Love: 9 Memoirs About Friendship, Dating and Surviving Your Twenties

Did you know Dolly Alderton wrote the TV version of her own memoir? The seven-part Everything I Know About Love series was written by Alderton for BBC One, with Emma Appleton and Bel Powley leading the cast, and it aired on BBC One and iPlayer in 2022. She also reads the audiobook herself. So if you’ve only read the paperback, you’ve missed her reading the recipes, hyperbolic group emails and recollections of twenty years with the same best friend.

My twenties happened on three continents, which means my best friends and I did most of our friendship over a time difference, and most of my dating went wrong in a country where I didn’t speak the language. So when I went looking for books like Alderton’s, I started with one rule: the woman has to read it herself.

Here’s my list of books like Everything I Know About Love, all of them on audio, all but one read by the woman who lived it:

The Short Version

• If you want the one where the friends are scattered across three continents and the dating goes wrong abroad, listen to Where to Nest by Kristen Van Nest: a woman quits her New York corporate job for a Fulbright year in Luxembourg and three years selling wine in Shanghai, read by the author.
• If you want more Dolly, listen to Dear Dolly by Dolly Alderton: her collected advice on love, life and friendship, with Alderton reading her own answers.
• If you want the famous one, listen to Yes Please by Amy Poehler: improv, SNL, divorce and motherhood, read by Poehler with Seth Meyers, Carol Burnett and Patrick Stewart dropping in.
• If you want the breakup told in real time, listen to Notes on Heartbreak by Annie Lord: Vogue’s dating columnist on a breakup and the recovery, read by the author.

How I Picked These Listens

I spent my twenties abroad, in Luxembourg and then Shanghai, so my group chat ran on a time difference and my worst dates happened in a country where I couldn’t read the menu. Here are my three criteria for a memoir that belongs next to Alderton’s:

1. The friends outlast the boyfriends: the men come and go and the women are still there at the end of the book. If the best friend gets two pages and the boyfriend gets a chapter, the author has it backwards, and I stop trusting her.
2. It happened to the person reading it to you: the author is the narrator, so when she gets to the humiliating part, she’s the one who has to say it out loud. An actor reading it would be smoother, which is the opposite of what I want from a story about being dumped.
3. It’s funny about the apartment, the hangover and the group chat: the small stuff gets the same attention as the heartbreak. I want the chapter about the roommate who stole the good pan as much as the one about being dumped.

At a Glance

Eight of the nine are read by the author; the ninth, Dear Dolly, has Alderton reading her own answers while other voices read the letters.

What Should I Listen to After Everything I Know About Love?

I picked nine, in three groups. One to four are the friendship books (Where to Nest, Dear Dolly, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, Yes Please), where the women in the author’s life get more pages than the men. Five to seven are the dating books (Notes on Heartbreak, You’ll Grow Out of It, Dear Girls), where a breakup or a dating streak is the spine of the book. The last two (How to Be a Woman, Scrappy Little Nobody) are about growing up female at all: Moran’s is an argument and Kendrick’s is a memoir of being, in her words, a very, very small weirdo. If you only have one credit, start with Dear Dolly, because it’s Alderton answering the questions you’d have asked her if you’d finished the first book and had her number.

1. Where to Nest by Kristen Van Nest (2024)

Read this if: If you want the one where the friends are scattered across three continents and the dating goes wrong abroad. If you want the only memoir here that asks what you owe the friends you left behind, and the only one with a ski date that nearly killed her.

What you’re getting: Where to Nest is a comedic travel memoir, read by the author, about Kristen Van Nest living abroad in her 20s after quitting a New York corporate job: a Fulbright year in Luxembourg, three years in the Shanghai wine business, and plenty of dating misadventures in between. The audiobook runs 9 hours and 17 minutes, and it’s free with an Audible trial. She’s in Greece during Grexit, Thailand during a coup, and China while working in the wine industry, with a long-distance love across three continents running underneath.

Why Alderton fans will like it: Alderton’s book has those hyperbolic group emails mocking the smugness of the coupled and the resentment of singles. I lived both halves of that email at one wedding, sitting between a friend in a serious relationship and a friend who had just started dating her future husband:

Listen, divorce is okay. Breaking up is okay. Starting over is okay. Moving on is okay. Saying no is okay. Being alone is okay. What is not okay is being the only single person at a wedding. It was a nightmare. It’s better to pretend that your pet raccoon ate rat poison, or any other excuse you can think of, to avoid a night of two joining in holy matrimony, while all the couples around you look wistfully into each other’s eyes, and you look deeply into the bottom of your Italian wedding soup.

Where to Nest, Chapter 19

I went outside and cried on the chapel steps, then scrolled Instagram and found another engagement announcement, which did not help. That is the chapter Alderton readers should start with, and on the audiobook you get the whole thing in the voice it happened to.

What readers say:

“Friendships that come and go. I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything as relatable as this memoir.” — Laura Donovan, Goodreads Reviewer

“It is a coming of age story with a modern Eat Pray Love twist.” — optimizer not satisficer, Amazon Reviewer

“A wise, witty, honest and inspiring account of how someone muddled through the many life choices of their twenties” — Lucy McIlgorm, Goodreads Reviewer

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2. Dear Dolly by Dolly Alderton (2023)

Read this if: you finished the memoir and wanted to ask her something.

What you’re getting: From HarperAudio, 4 hours 48 minutes. Alderton’s collected advice on love, life and friendship, from her Sunday Times column. Alderton narrates her own responses, and the readers’ letters are voiced by other people, so the questions and the answers arrive in different voices.

Why Alderton fans will like it: Publishers Weekly introduced the memoir as the work of a “former Sunday Times dating columnist,” and this is the column. If the thing you liked about the memoir was the voice, this is four more hours of it.

Fair warning: it’s an advice collection, not a memoir, so there’s no story to follow, and at 4 hours 48 minutes it’s over fast.

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3. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling (2011)

Read this if: your friendships were formed over Cheesecake Factory dates and you’d like that treated as serious history.

What you’re getting: From Random House Audio, four and a half hours, read by Mindy Kaling with B.J. Novak and Michael Schur. According to Publishers Weekly, “In this audio edition of her memoir, Kaling charts the course of her varied life, while offering often hilarious, sometimes poignant tips and words of wisdom mined from her childhood and adult life.” The childhood is Cambridge, Massachusetts, girl clique dates to the Cheesecake Factory included, and the adult life runs through New York, Los Angeles and The Office.

Why Alderton fans will like it: Kaling’s book has the same furniture as Alderton’s: essays and lists, and a girl clique whose Cheesecake Factory dates get treated as history. Publishers Weekly says “Kaling’s narration is conversational, entertaining, bubbly, and spirited” and reminiscent of Kelly Kapoor, her character on The Office. Sample this line first: “We clung to each other with blind loyalty like Lord Voldemort and his snake Nagini. I of course was Nagini.”

Fair warning: at four and a half hours it’s the shortest listen here, and the Office material is from 2011, so the pop culture has aged.

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4. Yes Please by Amy Poehler (2014)

Read this if: you want the friends to actually show up in the recording.

What you’re getting: From HarperAudio, 7 hours 30 minutes, read by Amy Poehler with Carol Burnett, Seth Meyers, Mike Schur, Patrick Stewart, Kathleen Turner and her own parents. Essays on improv, SNL and Parks and Recreation, full of what Kirkus calls “charm and life lessons.” According to Kirkus, “Poehler sounds consistently warm, funny, and genuine, and it’s only a matter of time before she’ll have you laughing out loud.”

Why Alderton fans will like it: Alderton’s book has one best friend in it for twenty years. Poehler brought hers into the studio: Kirkus says “When she’s joined in ‘her’ studio by Seth Meyers and Mike Schur to reminisce about ‘Saturday Night Live’ and ‘Parks and Recreation,’ it sounds like we’re overhearing candid (and giggly) conversations between friends.” The 2015 Audies gave it Humor and made it a finalist for Audiobook of the Year. She was also a finalist the same year for Narration by the Author or Authors.

Fair warning: with this many guests it’s less one woman talking to you than anything else on this list, so if the single-voice intimacy is what you loved in Alderton, this one trades some of it for a cast.

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5. Notes on Heartbreak by Annie Lord (2025)

Read this if: you want the breakup chapter stretched to a whole book, by a woman whose job is writing about dating.

What you’re getting: About nine hours, read by Annie Lord, in the US edition from Harper Perennial. According to Publishers Weekly, “British Vogue dating columnist Lord debuts with a raw and riveting take on love, loss, and moving on.”

Why Alderton fans will like it: Alderton was the Sunday Times dating columnist; Lord is Vogue’s. Both of them turned the column into a memoir. Lord’s covers one breakup, from the day it happened to the recovery. Publishers Weekly calls it “a smart, generous look at emotional devastation and recovery that will steal readers’ hearts.”

Fair warning: the US edition is new, so there’s no professional audio review of Lord’s narration yet, and Publishers Weekly’s phrase for Annie Lord’s book is “emotional devastation,” so save it for a week when you can take it.

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6. You’ll Grow Out of It by Jessi Klein (2016)

Read this if: you were the last of your friends to figure out dating and you’d like that narrated by someone who caught up.

What you’re getting: From Hachette Audio, 7 hours 15 minutes, read by Jessi Klein. According to Kirkus, “Jessi Klein gives voice to the tumult of being a late bloomer who grows up to become a smart woman in Hollywood,” and “Klein bares all in an honest, level tone, revealing the heartache of breakups and infertility treatments.”

Why Alderton fans will like it: Alderton’s teen years were an all-girls school and a fascination with boys. Klein took longer to get to the boys, and her book is about the wait. The Kirkus audio review says her reflections “are told to the listener in a casually confiding way,” and the verdict is “a hip feminist anthem told in the sarcastic tone of an older sibling.”

Fair warning: Kirkus notes that “Profanity and self-deprecation are sprinkled liberally throughout the pithy chapters,” and the infertility chapters are heavier than the title suggests.

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7. Dear Girls by Ali Wong (2019)

Read this if: you want the dating years told by a stand-up who never pauses for breath.

What you’re getting: From Random House Audio, 6 hours 15 minutes, read by Ali Wong with Justin Hakuta. Essays written as letters to her daughters, covering, in Kirkus’s words, “recollections of her teenage years to the very real demands of balancing a career and family life.” The same review: “Wong immerses listeners in her monologues seemingly without taking a breath.”

Why Alderton fans will like it: Kirkus says of Wong’s recording: “Her level of intimacy will make listeners feel as if they’re hearing from a friend, not listening to an audiobook by a celebrity.” The 2020 Audies made it a Humor finalist. I did stand-up four to five nights a week in Shanghai, and that no-breath delivery is a technique: you don’t give the room time to decide whether it’s okay to laugh.

Fair warning: Justin Hakuta reads part of it, and the career-and-family half means it’s as much about marriage and kids as about the dating years.

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8. How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran (2012)

Read this if: you want the argument underneath all these memoirs made out loud, by a woman who is furious and funny at the same time.

What you’re getting: The unabridged US edition from Harper Perennial, 8 hours 45 minutes, read by Caitlin Moran. According to Kirkus, “With equal amounts snarky brio and righteous anger, Moran brings the discussion of contemporary women’s rights down from the ivory tower and into the mainstream.”

Why Alderton fans will like it: Alderton’s teenage self was “desperate to be an adult.” Moran argues about what kind of woman to be, and Kirkus’s verdict is “Rapturously irreverent, this book should kick-start plenty of useful discussions.”

Fair warning: there are two Moran recordings on Amazon, and the BBC Radio 4 version is a one-hour full-cast dramatization, not the book. The link above is the unabridged one she reads herself.

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9. Scrappy Little Nobody by Anna Kendrick (2016)

Read this if: you want the childhood friendships and the playground grudges, with every voice done by the author.

What you’re getting: From Simon & Schuster Audio, 6 hours, read by Anna Kendrick. According to Kirkus, “Self-described as a ‘very, very small weirdo,’ the author entertains listeners with her tales of early friendships, playground battles, and discovering her calling as an actress.”

Why Alderton fans will like it: Alderton’s best material is the all-girls school and the twenty-year friendship. Kendrick grew up in Portland, Maine, and on audio she plays the kids she grew up with: Kirkus says “Moving briskly, she depicts entertaining scenes filled with dialogue, creating an array of distinct voices for those who populated her past, often ruefully recounting years-old slights with impressive detail.”

Fair warning: it’s a movie star’s memoir, so the broke twenties end in a career most of us didn’t get, and Kirkus notes Anna Kendrick has a “quick pace, sometimes sarcastic tone,” so don’t listen at 1.5x.

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Which One to Listen to Tonight

• You want the friends on three continents and the dates going wrong abroad: Where to Nest, the only one here with a ski date that nearly killed her.
• You want more Dolly and you have one evening: Dear Dolly, 4 hours 48 minutes of her answering strangers.
• You want to laugh with company: Yes Please, the 2015 Audie winner for Humor, with Seth Meyers in the booth.

If none of those fits, my post on how reading reduces stress has the numbers on what thirty minutes with a book does to your heart rate.

FAQ: Audiobooks Like Everything I Know About Love

What Should I Read After Everything I Know About Love?

These are my picks for books like Everything I Know About Love, all on audio: Where to Nest by Kristen Van Nest, Dear Dolly, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, Yes Please, Notes on Heartbreak, You’ll Grow Out of It, Dear Girls, How to Be a Woman and Scrappy Little Nobody. If what you want is books like Dolly Alderton’s in voice rather than subject, start with Dear Dolly and Notes on Heartbreak, the two books here by British dating columnists. For books like Dolly Alderton in subject, the friendship group at the top of the list is the place to start.

Is There an Everything I Know About Love Audiobook?

Yes. The Everything I Know About Love audiobook is read by Dolly Alderton herself, in the US edition from Harper. The book it carries is the one Kirkus called “A poignant breath of fresh air” for anyone still in “the dramedy of early adulthood,” and Publishers Weekly called “A hit in the U.K.” that “will likely speak to American audiences as well.”

What Other Dolly Alderton Books Are on Audio?

Dolly Alderton books on audio in the US include two more. Dear Dolly is her collected advice column, with Alderton reading her own answers. Ghosts is her novel, and it’s read by Holliday Grainger, not Alderton, which is why it isn’t on the list above.

What Are the Best Books About Female Friendship on Audio?

The best books about female friendship on this list put the friend in the title or on the recording: Yes Please has Poehler’s friends in the studio with her, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? has the girl clique at the Cheesecake Factory, and Where to Nest by Kristen Van Nest follows the friendships across Luxembourg, Shanghai and home. As Goodreads reviewer Laura Donovan put it: “If you’re in your thirties, you’ll love taking a trip down memory lane with this memoir.”

What Are the Best Books About Dating in Your 20s?

For books about dating in your 20s on audio, the three in the middle of this list are the ones built around it: Notes on Heartbreak is a dating columnist’s own breakup, You’ll Grow Out of It is the late bloomer catching up, and Dear Girls is the dating years told as letters to her daughters. All three are read by the author.

What Are the Best Books About Being Single in Your 20s?

For books about being single in your 20s, two here make it the whole plot. Everything I Know About Love has the group emails about the smugness of the coupled, and Where to Nest by Kristen Van Nest has the chapter about being the only single person at a wedding, read by the person who cried on the chapel steps. As Amazon reviewer Amanda put it: “She shares the ups and downs of trying to find yourself and navigate the merging of the life you dreamed of as child with the path you make for yourself as an adult.”

What Are the Best Memoir Audiobooks Read by the Author?

Two of the best memoir audiobooks on this list have Audie nominations for the author’s reading: Yes Please won Humor at the 2015 Audies and was a finalist for Narration by the Author, and Dear Girls was a 2020 Humor finalist. For a memoir audiobook where the author does every voice herself, Scrappy Little Nobody is the one Kirkus credits with “an array of distinct voices for those who populated her past.”

Is Everything I Know About Love a True Story?

Yes. Everything I Know About Love is a memoir: Dolly Alderton’s own twenties, from the hyperbolic group emails to the best friend she has had for twenty years. For the BBC series, Alderton changed the names and, in her words, “It’s semi-fictionalised, so don’t panic fellas.” The audiobook is the memoir, read by Alderton herself.

What Is Everything I Know About Love About?

Everything I Know About Love is Dolly Alderton’s memoir of her twenties: the dates, the recipes, the hyperbolic group emails, and twenty years with the same best friend. Kirkus called it “A poignant breath of fresh air” for anyone still in “the dramedy of early adulthood,” and Alderton reads the audiobook herself.

Is There a TV Show of Everything I Know About Love?

Yes. Dolly Alderton wrote the seven-part series herself, produced by Working Title Television for BBC One, with Emma Appleton and Bel Powley leading the cast, and it aired on BBC One and BBC iPlayer in 2022. The Everything I Know About Love audiobook is still the version where she tells it herself.

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