So, well done to Caitlin Moran, the working-class girl who triumphed in journalism, and produced the 2011 publishing phenomenon How to Be a Woman, purported to put the fun into feminism. Along the way, Moran fended off increasingly bizarre and petty disparagements, to my mind merely proving that some people find a successful, noisy, happy woman hard to take. Or am I missing something, and are there prominent male writers being critiqued purely on the basis of their facial expressions in publicity photographs?
Now Moran's second novel, How to Build a Girl, has her distinctive semi-autobiographical stamp all over it. The 14-year-old Johanna Morrigan lives with her large, skint, eccentric family in a Wolverhampton council house, before escaping through writing to London in the early 1990s to work in the music press. Which of course sounds like Moran's own (tweaked) life story – with added poetic-cum-comedic licence ("My life is basically The Bell Jar written by Adrian Mole"), and a 1980s-style theme of reinvention.
Johanna doesn't really want to kill herself, she just wants to stop being an overweight "goth-curious", "kissless virgin", who's routinely mistaken for her own mother. She wants to "build a new girl" – a hard-drinking wisecracker, inspired by Oscar Wilde's niece, Dolly (who becomes her music-journalism alter ego). From there, we follow Johanna's raucous odyssey, from teen introspection in Wolverhampton ("I wanna begat myself"), to London, and hard-won insights: "So what do you do when you build yourself – only to realise that you've built yourself up with the wrong things?"
As a one-time music hack, I enjoyed the depiction of Britpop(ish) times. However, How to Build a Girl is as much about class as anything else. Johanna rails at a wealthy lover: "I'm not your bit of rough. You're my bit of posh." In Wolverhampton, Moran deftly conjures a provincial life on benefits ("Children raised on cortisol. Children who think too fast"). To her credit, the Morrigans emerge fleshed out, funny and loving, rather than crudely caricatured by their circumstances.
Elsewhere, there's a lot of sex, with Johanna pondering the unfairness of being deemed a "massive slag". ("You wouldn't denigrate a plumber with a lot of experience fitting bathrooms.") One session with a well-endowed man ("I feel like a snake handler on Blue Peter") results in raging cystitis ("a billion Lilliputian arrows"). Then there's masturbation. Reviewing How to Be a Woman, Germaine Greer wondered if Moran would regret talking about masturbation so openly. Going by this, it would appear that Moran only regretted not talking about it more. As with How to Be a Woman, the novel is wittily written but, if she persists, Moran is in danger of becoming to female masturbation what Keats was to nightingales. Johanna is such a female Portnoy you wonder how she manages to get any writing done. As for sexual relationships, it's only many selfish lovers down the line that Johanna realises she's not "hearing her own voice" and begins to yearn for better sex ("Sex with more of me in it").
How to Build a Girl emerges as a quasi-cautionary tale about how personal development ("building yourself") is a process, as opposed to an exact science. There are some retreads of Moran's past themes – material that seems a tad overfamiliar. In particular, the overlap between Moran's voice in HTBAW and Johanna's in HTBAG is sometimes too acute. For all that, the novel is an entertaining read, with Moran in fine voice – hilarious, wild, imaginative and highly valuable. After all, how often do we get to hear the inner voice of a fat, funny, literate, working-class teenager from Wolverhampton? Quite.
