CAITLIN Moran’s latest book, How to Build a Girl, is the story of 14-year-old Johanna Morrigan from a family living on disability benefits in Wolverhampton.“Growing up during the Cold War, and the persistent threat of nuclear apocalypse,” Johanna has always, “vaguely presumed that the nuclear apocalypse had, in fact, already happened — here.” A “hopeless romantic” who has “read a lot of 19th-century literature,” Johanna is also a clever and cheerful young girl who more than anything else believes in herself.
An alcoholic father and a mother suffering from postnatal depression make an eccentric pair of parents. Afraid that she may unwittingly cause her family to lose their benefits, Johanna decides to become financially independent and help her family so that when the truth comes out they won’t be too mad at her.
She starts with a few odd jobs but becomes determined to become a writer because “poor people can write. It’s one of the few things poverty, and lack of connections, cannot stop you doing.” She wins a local poetry competition but realises that as long as she is herself, she can never be really free. Thus, she comes to the conclusion that her only option is to kill herself and start anew, “to conjure myself, out of every sparkling, fast moving thing I can see. I want to be the creator of me.”
She invents a brand new identity for herself by the new name of Dolly Wilde. The exhilaration of inventing a new persona keeps her sane and positive: “I love Dolly Wilde. She’s my new pet.”
Dolly Wilde becomes a teenage music journalist. Johanna realises that by building a new girl, all of a sudden the world seems altered: “I’m like Alice when she gets bigger, then smaller, then bigger again, in Wonderland. My scale has changed.”
Johanna has a dark secret: “my biggest secret of all — the one I would rather die than tell, the one I wouldn’t even put in my diary — is that I really, truly, in my heart, want to be beautiful. I want to be beautiful so much — because it will keep me safe, and keep me lucky, and it’s too exhausting not to be.”
However, when she becomes a writer a new world opens up to her, a world where the sole purpose of her existence is not conditioned to pleasing boys: “All my life, I’ve thought that if I couldn’t say anything boys found interesting, I might as well shut up. But now I realise there was that whole other, invisible half of the world — girls — that I could speak to instead.”
Like any teenage girl, Johanna makes the mistake of falling in love with a musician she interviews and ends up gushing all over him in her review. However, she grows out of this phase and starts writing critical and cruel music reviews instead. By the age of 17 she has become a successful music journalist. Johanna, who had always feared that she wasn’t real now finally feels “incontrovertibly real” because she’s being discussed by other people. Sadly she gets so caught up in this new world that she becomes estranged: the maze of her new persona becomes a prison.
The plot is interesting enough and the writing enticing and hilarious, though I found the humour a little trite at times. Overall, How to Build a Girl is a fascinating and endearing account of a fat teenage girl who, at an early age, becomes a sensation in the field of music journalism. I thoroughly enjoyed almost every page of this book. If you’re looking for a politically correct book that will make you laugh your heart out then look no further; Moran knows just what you want.
Moreover, Moran speaks for the young women of the 21st-century. Johanna’s relentless longing to be kissed and have sexual relations with men is distinctly post-feminist in her indifference towards societal opinions. Yet, despite being an independent spirit Johanna wants to be admired by men and her biggest fear is remaining a virgin all her life. At the same time, she is a strong-headed girl who does not shy away from her individual, selfish desires.
Moran’s big message for her readers is that we have a choice to break free of the chains of bad circumstances, to make up new selves and become whatever we want to be. Johanna symbolises multifarious subjectivity, old-fashioned femininity with a twist, sexual freedom, economic independence, and the right to enjoy life.
How to Build a Girl
(NOVEL)
By Caitlin Moran
Ebury Press, UK
ISBN 978-0091949006
352pp.
