Edinburgh International Book Festival round-up: Dolly Alderton | Jeremy Bowen | Alistair Moffat
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Things you learn at the Edinburgh Book Festival, No 1. That there is such a thing as Dolly Fishing. I learnt this as one of the 25 men in the otherwise all-female audience of 900 at the McEwan Hall.
Dolly Fishing is, apparently, when a man wanting to boost his appeal to women appears on social media reading a book by bestselling writer Dolly Alderton.
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Hide AdThis, Alderton added, in an enjoyable chat with fellow millennial best-selling writer Yomi Adegoke wouldn’t work for her. “But if I saw a man waving a copy of [Elizabeth Gilbert’s] Eat, Pray, Love on the dancefloor, that would do it.” The audience - the youngest and most female I’ve seen since Sex in the City writer Candace Bushnell graced Charlotte Square’s Main Tent 21 years ago - cooed in agreement.
Both women know their way around social media, indeed the shaming of a fiancé in a Twitter storm is the subject of Adegoke’s The List, which is currently being adapted in an HBO/BBC/A24 co-production. And when Alderton’s Ghosts (“Gone Girl for a dead relationship”) hits the small screen for what will be her second TV series, I’d be interested to know who plays the lead.
“A famous actor,” she said, “rang me up begging to be considered for the role because he felt remorseful about all the women he himself had ghosted”. The audience collectively tutted. “Was it Paul Mescal?” asked Adegoke. Sharp gasps all round. “I’ll tell you later,” said Alderton. “Or after another of these,” indicating the fizzing flutes in front of them.
Both women made their debuts with non-fiction (the memoir Everything I Know About Love in Alderton’s case, while Adegoke’s Slay in Your Lane was billed as a “Black Girl Bible”) before trying fiction. They disagreed about which kind of writing was more emotionally revealing, with Alderton saying she felt less exposed writing novels. Refreshingly, she’s not bothered if anyone identifies her with her fiction, as “whenever I read anything the first thing I do is to go on a Google rampage to see what’s really true”.
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Hide AdShe’s pithy about other things too. A single rave review on Tim Tok made her memoir a bestseller in the US , so “anyone not excited about the new ways of selling books is an idiot.” Asked about her male readers, she replied: “I don’t have any”. She’s wrong about that. I’ve read her. And no, I’m not Dolly Fishing.
In spite of the deaths he has been too close to and the depression and fear that, he candidly admitted, have haunted him in the past, Jeremy Bowen remains true to the best traditions of BBC objective reporting (check out his 2008 The Birth of Israel before it disappears from iPlayer in two months). He won’t, he thinks, see Middle East peace in his lifetime. In one of the last attempts - Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’, which effectively ignored the Palestinians, he revealed that the President’s son-in-law Jared Kushner explained why it would work. “It’s just a deal,” he told Bowen at a New York media briefing. “Forget history.”
Forgetting history would be an impossibility for Alistair Moffat, who brings Scotland’s past to life so completely and prolifically that he had two new books on the subject to talk about at yesterday’s event (like Bowen’s, but unlike Alderton’s, still watchable on edbookfest.co.uk) - a border walk musing on nationalism (Between Britain) and a new history of the Highlands and Islands. His explanation of the tactics of the Highland charge was riveting and fully explained why Highlanders were the most feared warriors of their day. Nothing could stop them apart from bogs. Why didn’t they know this?
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