#good material

Hemp could work as another material to build houses and make them cool in Summer and warm in Winter! Hemp fiber wall, stayed for 4 hours under heat of 360° and barely burned.

Good Material by Dolly Alderton ⭐⭐⭐️⭐️💫

Andy and Jen broke up. Andy couldn’t understand why and carved out his time trying to figure out the answer. Some people would describe Andy as obsessive, but I found him relatable. I felt for his pain as if I was going through it, yet I couldn’t help but burst out laughing at the witty remarks Dolly Alderton suddenly injected. I can’t count how many times I had to sit up in bed and laughed like an idiot.

4.5/5

This might be an unexpected take but Good Material is perhaps my favourite romance, like ever. Fans and haters alike might disagree, that this is a romance, that it’s good because it is a romance, but allow me a long winded defense.

I want to interpret Good Material as a romance novel because it is most centrally a character study though the lens of a romantic relationship. That this relationship has ended ought not really to matter (I find the RWA’s definition, which includes a requirement for a happy ending, to be overly prescriptive and limiting). Romance as an experience can be much more than getting into and being in a relationship. The idea that a person’s life is just the runway up to their One Perfect Soulmate, that an other relationships they may have must be unimportant and unsatisfying, and that once with this soulmate they must remain together in their best relationship forever, is regressive. I get that romance as a genre has very concrete conventions because it offers a fantasy that most readers do enjoy, but that does not mean there is no space here for experimental and alternative takes. The unexpected take on a relationship was exactly why I liked the book. It felt fresh in a way that extremely trope-y conventional romance does not (again, I get that this is precisely why most readers like it, but come on guys we can have both).

Rather than being about falling in love, Good Material is about moving on. Beyond the character study of a well-intentioned if imperfect and intensely needy man, the primary theme is the emotional experience of singlehood. I think reading this as a romance is the best way to appreciate what it has to offer. It is romance in that it is the absence of romance. Our protagonist suffers because he defines his life by romance and doesn’t know how to endure its absence. And, I do have to admit, as an eternally single person, I did enjoy a book about finding oneself through singleness more than I do about falling in love in the same manner as one gets hit by a freight train.

Good Material is a character study of a washed-up burnt-out failed comedian clinging to his recent break up to avoid confronting the fact that he’s still living like a college student in his mid-thirties, and it might even be his own fault. Something about the ostensibly well-intentioned but so deeply unself-aware that he ends up hurting people anyway protagonist has been really compelling to me recently, and Good Material’s Andy fits the bill perfectly.

Your mileage may vary depending on how much of Andy’s deeply unreliable narration you can take. Most of the negative reviews I perused mentioned having little patience for Andy’s self-pity, but at least for me that was the whole point. Andy is comically self-absorbed, so much so that he can’t even make jokes about it. There’s a lot of humour in his myopia, but also a lot of realness. We’ve all been that person who can’t seem to grasp that at least some of the reason things aren’t going well for them is themselves. The unself-aware male protagonist is so compelling for me perhaps because I see a lot of myself in them. The lonely romantic is ever compelled to wonder what they are doing that is so objectionable to prospects.

I think it is a pretty serious misread of the text to suggest that Andy is petty, out of control, and emotionally dense by accident. All of that stuff is the entire point. He literally would rather humiliate himself pretending to go to therapy than actually go to therapy. Needless to say, I found this all extremely funny. But, I do have to acknowledge that in order to do so, one needs to give Andy the benefit of the doubt. Personally, I’m not sure why you wouldn’t. He is only fictional, and helped along by that fact that his misadventures resemble in tone if not in specifics Alderton’s own hot mess era chronicled in her memoir Everything I Know about Love. Reading Andy as very much a man written by a woman definitely helped the medicine go down.

The thing that really tied it all together for me was the ending. After trekking through Andy’s nostalgic and occasionally nauseating return to every part of this relationship, seeing his ex coloured by every stage of grief, we finally meet her. We hear the breakup for her perspective. Jen’s sections reveal her as a fiercely indpendant person starkly different from Andy (a romantic who struggles to exist outside of a relationship). The break up blindsides Andy, and he spends the subsequent novel trying to understand Jen and tying himself in anxious and resentful knots over what others think of him. We reach Jen’s perspective to reveal that it’s true, Andy never really understood her at all. The reason Andy has been looking for, the thing he can do to make her come back to him, doesn’t exist. The break up was never about him.

The novel is about self-awareness. The breakup throws Andy’s self-perception as the great boyfriend, half of a whole, into disarray. Its fallout sees him begin to encounter the difference between how he sees himself and how he appears to other people. When we meet Jen, the truth, or at least another view of it, is revealed. She was never as invested in becoming part of a romantic unit, in being a girlfriend. The parts of Andy that drove her away were not, as he assumed, his crappy career prospects, but rather his smothering devotion to the idea of a relationship. It felt so fresh and rebellious to read something as small as a woman who chooses to break up for her own sake. For the reveal to be that for her it was never really about this man or any others, but about living her own life.