Summary

In the first chapter, “Everything I Knew About Love as a Teenager”, Dolly Alderton details her understanding of romantic relationships as an adolescent. She believed “romantic love [was] the most important and exciting thing” and that if adults did not have a romantic relationship they had “failed” (1). Her romantic ideals were based largely on her prepubescent attempts to interact with boys and a singular fixation on love as the measure of self-worth.

Alderton describes her suburban coming of age in “Boys.” As a teenager, she lived in a suburban town that was too far from the city to indoctrinate her into urban youth culture and not rural enough to group her into the “feral country teenagers who wore old fisherman’s sweaters and learned how to drive their...