This follow-up to “How to Build a Girl” is a funny, frank and tender look at a young woman coming into her own. Having “built the girl”, Johanna is now living alone in London, at 18, and writing for a popular rock and roll magazine. Traveling Europe to interview musicians and review gigs, she’s living the life she had dreamed of. But, trying to be true to herself is difficult as she tries to fit in both in the workplace and the London social scene. Desperate […]
Instruction Manual with No Instructions
Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman is definitely one of the funnier memoirs I’ve read. I’m not so sure about some of her advice/opinions, but as she herself states, it’s possible to admire someone even if you don’t agree with 100% of what they say. “What is feminism? Simply the belief that women should be as free as men, however nuts, dim, deluded, badly dressed, fat, receding, lazy and smug they might be. Are you a feminist? Hahaha. Of course you are.” “So here […]
This is more about me than the book.
In How to Build a Girl Caitlin Moran manages to write a story of teenaged angst that so closely resembles my own experiences that I though she had perhaps stolen my diary and just added a lot (like, a lot, a lot) more sex. Except I didn’t keep a diary in those days. (Now you would call it a journal, and be really precious about it). How to Build a Girl is the story of Johanna Morrigan, a working-class girl in 90s England who hates […]
The not-real tale of a musical-loving, book-reading, clever fat virgin who just wants to fit in
“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 my safe, and keep me lucky, and it’s too exhausting not to be.” This is my first CBR year and my first attempt at a book review, so be kind, and only throw the softest and freshest of vegetables my way. Fortunately, I made […]