Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Year: 2014
ISBN: 978-0-091949-00-6
No. of Pages: 340

‘There is no academy where you can learn to be yourself; there is no line manager, slowly urging you towards the correct answer. You are midwife to yourself, and you will give birth to yourself, over and over, in dark rooms, alone’ – How to Build a Girl, Cailtin Moran.

Words cannot express the depth of my love for Caitlin Moran. I’m rather a late comer to the Moran party, only having read her 2011 bestselling book How to Be a Woman about a month ago, and picking up How to Build a Girl immediately after while binge watching Raised by Wolves, the Channel 4 show co-written by Moran and her sister. I actually would not recommend this level of immersion in all things Caitlin, I’m not convinced it’s healthy, but even filling my every waking moment for about two weeks with most of her recent output has not killed what can only be described as an obsessional love for this woman.

Moran is certainly an impressive figure. Home educated on a Wolverhampton council estate, she published her first novel for children at the age of 16, and by 18 was a regular columnist for The Times, where she still writes three columns a week. She has won multiple awards for her novels and journalism, including the Galaxy National Book Award Book of the Year for How to Be a Woman, and was named Columnist of the Year by the London Press Club in 2012. How to Build a Girl is her first work of adult fiction, published in 2014, and is the first of a planned trilogy.

The novel follows fourteen year old Johanna Morrigan, living in a council house in Wolverhampton with her alcoholic father, depressed mother, and four siblings, surviving only on disabled benefit and bolognese that consists mostly of peas. The first half of the novel is a very believable and beautifully observed portrait of life for a working class British teenager, as Johanna tries to find money to help her family while discovering who she is, and trying to transform herself into someone she wants to be. The novel, although fiction, is known to be semi-autobiographical, and here is where I personally feel it falls down slightly. While I still found it hugely enjoyable, I could see the strong parallels with anecdotes described by Moran in How to Be a Woman, and it took me slightly longer than I would have expected to read the first half of this book. I felt that I’d read quite a lot of it before. However, by the second half I was firmly under Moran’s spell again, deeply impressed with how the novel manages to be didactic without being heavy-handed, and totally, totally in love with the moments where Moran’s own poetic use of language shines through Johanna’s colloquial narrative:

And later, over a glass of wine – because you drink
wine now, because you are grown – you will marvel
over what you did. Marvel that, at the time, you kept
so many secrets. Tried to keep the secret of yourself.
[…] When really, you were about as secret as the moon.
And as luminous, under all those clothes.

What really resonates throughout this whole book is love. The adult Johanna narrating the novel has an obvious and overwhelming love and respect for her younger self and has forgiven her for her mistakes, recognising that these rites of passage, such as getting nervous and talking like Elvis and taking ‘really rough speed’, are all part of building a girl. You take these experiences and you build the adult that you are to become. How to Build a Girl is not only a brilliantly written and entertaining novel, it is an incredibly positive one. Moran has created a portrait of a girl in Johanna that is not only believable but affirming. You can see the beauty in stupidity, the importance of every step in the process of becoming. In looking back and seeing her younger self, the socially awkward compulsive masturbator, as beautiful, adult Johanna allows us all to do the same. Caitlin Moran is definitely one to watch, and I eagerly await the next chapter in Johanna’s story.