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Do you have a group of female friends you simply couldn’t live without? Or are you trying to juggle making time for your friends alongside the 101 other things that need time in your life?

Dolly Alderton is a writer, podcaster and The Sunday Times agony aunt. But you might know her best for her memoir Everything I Know About Love, which is being adapted into a Â鶹ԼÅÄ TV series, and her novel Ghosts.

She joined Emma Barnett on Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour to discuss the importance of female friendship and her advice-giving prowess. Keep reading for six nuggets of wisdom about friendship we learnt from her...

“The memoir that I wrote ended up being this ode to female friendship, which I'd never set out to do,” says Dolly. “I thought I was just writing about my dating adventures. And then I got to the final chapter of the memoir and looked back, and I was like: ‘What is this book about? What's the conclusion? What am I trying to say here?’

“There was only one thing that was constant in every chapter of my 20s and in every chapter of the book. It was this ensemble of women that were around me, that were there for the high days and the low days, who I'd lived with and worked out womanhood with. So, it accidentally became this huge love story about my friends. It was it was a story about falling in love, but it was about falling in love with this gang of girls. So, that felt like it was the right direction for it.”

“I wrote Everything I Know About Love when I was 28 and I was very certain about love and particularly friendship then,” says Dolly. “The end of the book is a very certain young woman being very certain about this manifesto of friendship, which is that friendship should take precedent above every relationship in your life.

“I look back on that as like an incredibly sweet and naive way of looking at things now that I'm in this decade of life where there are all these obstacles in the way of hanging out with your friend on a Wednesday night. I think that the idea of friendship and love is in flux for your whole life, isn't it?”

“With everything you acquire in your own life, it can potentially render a loss in your friendships,” says Dolly. “When someone gets a huge promotion and they're at the office twice as much, when someone gets one baby or two babies or three babies, when someone has an ill parent they have to look after... The easiest place for collateral damage is friendship. That's the easiest place to cut the hours, there's just no way of avoiding that.

“So, the question and the quest, I think, for the rest of our lives if you if you are committed to this importance of friendship, is about: How do you retain that closeness without it being as many contact hours?”

“I'm confident in saying that I am the most fabulous advice giver,” says Dolly. “And I still never take any of the advice I hand out. That's why I think an imperfect agony is a really important thing. Because when I'm writing those replies to people every week, so often, I'm not just replying to those people, I'm writing it to myself.

“It’s the way that I process problems and I process my own anxieties. When I'm telling someone in a very didactic way how they should solve something or the decisions they should make, it is often me speaking in frustration to myself. That's what I love. It's therapy for myself, as I hope it is for other people.”

“I've drawn up these boundaries. I haven't written about my personal life or talked in detail about my personal life for a long time,” says Dolly. “But that being said, I still understand the reason why women come up to me and ask often inappropriate questions or say inappropriate things.

“There's a very simple reason and it's because I've spoken to them in a very inappropriate way. I've spoken to them in a very intimate way. So, of course, now that conversation has started, they can say the same to me. I totally understand that. I think that makes sense.”

“It’s magic to be able to be fully yourself with another woman,” says Dolly. “To rid yourself of the shackles of what it is to be the perfect woman and to say: ‘You know what, I actually really hate my kid at the moment.’ Or: ‘My partner is driving me insane.’ Or: ‘I'm feeling weird about how I look at the moment.’

“With trust, to say that to another woman is so cathartic, and it is such a special thing. I love that. I feel very lucky that I get to have that not only with my female friends, but also with loads of other women (often drunk in bars) coming up. And they can come up to me all they like.”

Listen back to the full interview with Dolly Alderton on Â鶹ԼÅÄ Sounds, where you can also catch up on any episodes of Woman’s Hour you may have missed. Or join the conversation @bbcwomanshour on and .

Have you had a friendship go wrong? We’re making a series about how friendships can rupture and repair – or not. Is this your story? We’d love to hear about your experience. Contact us here.