Review: How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran

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.

Why You Should Read: Andrea Gibson

‘I want everything you have ever tried to wash away’
– ‘Emergency Contact’, Andrea Gibson

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I first heard of Andrea Gibson in my last year of uni. I was sitting in my mate’s living room at 2 in the morning, pissed and eating Doritos, having bumped into her and a mutual friend outside the student’s union a few hours before. As I have FABULOUS friends, conversation soon turned to poetry, feminism, and gay rights, and our friend mentioned a favourite poem on gay marriage, ‘I Do’ by Andrea Gibson. Literary minded lesbian that I am, the friend assumed that I’d have heard of her, and was scandalised to find that I’d never read anything Gibson had written, or seen any of her (numerous) performance videos on Youtube. Half an hour later, we had decamped to the living room of my mate’s dorm where, after removing our bras (and genuinely having to talk our friend out of burning hers and/or throwing it in the canal near our campus), she got her laptop out and showed me ‘Maybe I Need You’, one of the most beautiful bits of performance poetry I have ever seen. I am still very proud of Drunk Grace for not crying.

Andrea Gibson is an American queer activist and performance poet who writes on a variety of topics very close to my little queermo heart, including gender presentation, homophobia, mental health, love, sex, and dogs. I especially love her poem about dogs. She writes beautifully on human relationships, and her love poems are some of the most brutally honest, gorgeous, and painful bits of writing I have ever read. Her power comes from vulnerability. She is not afraid to bleed in twelve-point font, every insecurity, fear, messy break-up in ink for all the world to read. I was lucky enough to see her perform at The Deaf Institute in Manchester this year, and her words are even more powerful in person. Although she works on the page, she is definitely a poet whose work is most effective when heard out loud, spoken by a visibly nervous yet compelling Gibson who holds the room’s attention without seemingly having to try. I left the gig more than a little in love with her, hugging my signed copy of Pansy the whole way home.

With six albums and two full length collections of poetry available, not to mention the myriad of videos on Youtube, Andrea Gibson has plenty of material available for anyone who wants to check her out. But keep a box of tissues handy. You’ll thank me later.

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Visit Andrea Gibson at her website or check out this awesome performance on Youtube.

We Aim to Misbehave: A Reading List for my Fourteen-Year-Old Self

It is a truth universally acknowledged that being a teenager is hard. There is no denying it. Hormones mean you cry at least fifteen times a day, your hair won’t do what you tell it to, and your dad really does not understand how important it is that you go out on Tuesday because literally EVERYONE IN THE WORLD is going, and Laura’s mum doesn’t care that it’s a school night. But these turbulent few years change the way you view the world and, most importantly, yourself. In a world where the media is constantly bombarding teenagers with unrealistic beauty standards, and social media means that school follows you home, the media that you choose to consume has taken on unprecedented significance. Books can educate. Books can change you. So here is a reading list for my tear stained, heavily eye-linered, fourteen-year-old self, or any teenage girl, in fact. Because who wants to read about the new fad diet when you can have feminism, lesbianism, and angst instead?

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Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution – Sara Marcus

Every teenage girl needs Riot Grrrl. It was a movement that revolutionised the US punk scene in the late ’80s and early ’90s, a rad fem uprising reclaiming space from the boys who had dominated the scene of the time, banishing women to the sidelines. Marcus’s book is an exploration of the women behind the movement and the impact that it had, a must read for any angry, creative teenager who’s ever felt that rock was an all boy club.

The Magic Toyshop – Angela Carter

Although not for the faint of heart, Angela Carter is one of my favourite writers, and this coming of age story is a must read for any teenage girl. When Melanie’s parents are killed in a plane accident, she and her siblings are sent to live with their tyrannical Uncle Philip in his toy shop in South London. Although the magical realist elements are strong here, the novel is really about Melanie’s process of self-discovery, finding herself capable of a strength and sexuality that she didn’t know she had.

Sugar Rush – Julie Birchill

Okay, okay, I admit, this is not the best written book in the universe but when tween Grace read this, it was revolutionary. Utterly. Mindblowing.

As a (now out and proud, then very closeted) lesbian who had a nasty habit of falling in love with school friends, this was what I needed to read. I wasn’t weird, I wasn’t sick. Hell, I wasn’t even the only one. I remember sitting on my bedroom floor, almost ten years ago now, devouring nearly the whole book in one sitting. Queer or not, this fun book captures something about being fifteen, and it has always stuck in my mind as something every teenager should read.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson

Sugar Rush’s far, far better written and at times utterly heart breaking older sister, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is one of my favourite books of all time. This semi-autobiographical account of a young lesbian discovering who she is in a strictly Christian town is described in gorgeous prose by Winterson, and is necessary reading for any teenager who feels like they don’t fit in.

How to Be A Woman – Caitlin Moran

Words cannot describe how much I love this book. Part memoir, part feminist rant, this book is a collection of witty and at times laugh-out-loud funny musings on what it takes to be a woman in the 21^st Century. From body hair to abortion no topic is off limits, and Moran gets her point across without seeming preachy or condescending. Debunking a lot of the pressure put on young women with the simple question ‘do the boys have to do it? No? Then don’t worry’, this book is a must read for teenage girls everywhere.

The Life and Loves of A She-Devil – Fay Weldon

A personal favourite, this ludicrously fun book is the story of a well-behaved woman who gets screwed over despite doing everything society told her and subsequently decides to thoroughly, thoroughly misbehave. Take note, teenage me. Take very detailed notes.

Little Women – Louisa May Alcott

Little Women seems a strange choice next to many of the others on this list. For one, the girls all seem relatively well-behaved, there is no big exposé of how removing your body hair is part of a patriarchal plot, and none of the characters are actually lesbians. Not even Jo. But, when it comes to sisterhood and female solidarity, this book has it down. The March women could teach the Corleone’s a thing about family. None of them ever tell a sister that she cannot do something: from Jo’s writing to Amy’s art, they are all extremely supportive. Also, and this is a biggie, Mrs March is determined that her girls marry for love, and not for money: their happiness as humans is more important to her than their economic value. And Jo is just amazing. I refuse to be told otherwise.

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

Aside from being one of the most famous books in English literature, every teenage girl should read Pride and Prejudice because, actually, Elizabeth and her sister Jane are pretty kick ass. SURE, she marries the guy at the end, but that’s because she actually loves him: our Lizzie was more than willing to give up his £10,000 a year when she thought Darcy was a dick. We could all do with more witty and intelligent women in our literary lives, quite aside from the fact that the love and loyalty between Jane and Elizabeth is a lesson in sisterhood every young woman should remember.

The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

I know, I know, hear me out. Who in their right mind would give a probably totally self-absorbed, introspective, and emotionally volatile teenager a copy of The Bell Jar? Answer: me. Esther Greenwood is every intelligent, creative young woman who is told by society that she can’t be these things and be attractive, something that’s just as prevalent now as it was in the 1950s. So what does she do? Shake her fist at the patriarchy and tell them all to go to hell while writing a fabulous novel? No. Unfortunately she has a breakdown. But in the process she calls out a lot of patriarchal bullshit, and does not compromise or dumb herself down to get society (a.k.a. boys) to like her. So yeah, I would give this (beautiful, gorgeous, devastating) novel to teenage me. You can do this, teenage me. But don’t touch those sleeping pills. They’re not good.

Ahoy there.

I hate introductions. I’m not convinced that I ever make a particularly good first impression: I get nervous and incredibly British, and either stick my foot in my mouth or clam up completely. So I’ll keep this brief. My name’s Grace. I’m a twenty-one year old lesbian with a soft-spot for dogs and a hatred of baked beans. A deep seated, burning hatred of those little pellets of evil. But that’s besides the point.
My hatred of baked beans is only rivalled by my love of books and women who misbehave, and the only thing better than that is the two of them combined. So voilà. Welcome to my blog, where I obsess about books by or about women doing things they probably shouldn’t. Every week I’ll post new content, whether it’s book reviews, reading lists, author spotlights, etc. So put your feet up, grab a mug, fill that mug with wine, and let’s get stuck in.