Moran Builds a Compelling Tale

On the first page of Caitlin Moran’s new novel, “How to Build a Girl,” our narrator, 14-year-old Johanna Morrigan, is caught in the uncomfortable situation of masturbating in the bed she shares with her younger brother. She puts a pillow in between them and calls it their Berlin Wall: “Sexually aware adolescents on one side (West Germany), six-year-old boys on the other (Communist Europe).” From there the book doesn’t for a page cease its hilarity. It is at times, perhaps, too funny for its own good—the jokes so frequent they can seem like a nervous tick. But beyond—and even by means of—the novel’s humor, Moran achieves a high degree of honesty. Unlike so many other novels that feature young female protagonists, this book doesn’t dumb down the adolescent girl experience. It is exciting to see a book that doesn’t follow this mold, one intended to exclude neither teens nor adults from its audience.

The tone of “How to Build a Girl,” which is Moran’s first novel, is very similar to that of her widely acclaimed memoir, “How to Be a Woman.” We meet Johanna when she is 14—but, as in Moran’s memoir, the story is told looking back on these events from a wiser, more grown-up perspective. Fictional Johanna has a lot in common with the real adolescent Caitlin described in “How to Be a Woman”: both grew up in council houses (a type of public housing in the UK) in Wolverhampton with large families, and both began working as music journalists in their teen years. Their personalities too are similar—they grow from boundlessly optimistic children into more cynical and anxiety-ridden yet ambitious teenagers. It is clear that Moran sticks to what she knows, and this is to the novel’s credit, as the narrative’s profundity is founded in its sincerity.

The novel’s greatest departure from the memoir is that it lacks direct analysis, which Moran frequently includes in her first book. However, this makes “How to Build a Girl” all the more powerful. Not only does Moran have more time to focus on details, but, simply put, she diligently follows the oft-given advice to show and not to tell. And what she shows us is that the adolescent experience, so often segregated in storytelling from the rest of the human experience, is a greatly complex and deeply human one. Few books with teenage protagonists, and even fewer books actually aimed at adults, depict adolescence in all its complexity. Female protagonists in particular tend to be middle or upper class (unless their poverty is the premise) and thin (unless their weight is the premise). And they face a very limited set of problems—never more than two or three at a time, and usually boy-related.

What Moran does with her novel is to showcase the reality behind all the stereotypical teenage fears and desires. They are fueled by much deeper, more universal human feelings: from the most primitive, such as sex drive, to the most advanced, such as a physical disconnect during sex due to the lack of a female narrative in mainstream society. And she doesn’t limit her protagonist to a certain level of complexity: Johanna is both intelligent and obsessed with being kissed. “My kissing is going to change everything,” she says. “I’m going to be the Beatles of kissing.” She is a fan-girl as well as a writer (of poetry, music reviews, an attempted novel), and a lover of “The Chronicles of Narnia” alongside George Orwell. The novel does a service to the young adult genre, as it is far franker and more realistic in dealing with teenagers and their problems than are many of that ilk.

However, the novel is not without its flaws; most notably, the plot and characters are sometimes difficult to believe. After investing two years in recreating herself as “Dolly Wilde,” 16-year-old Johanna scores a job as a music journalist. It’s hard to declaim this plot point as unrealistic when Moran herself accomplished the same feat in real life. But compared to the picture we get of young Caitlin’s work at “Melody Maker” in “How to Be a Woman,” Johanna’s (or Dolly’s) work at “D&ME” seems to be multiplied by a glamor factor of three or four. When Johanna is wowing her adult coworkers with her daring and getting invited to parties with famous musicians, the book seems to stray from its well of truth and begins to resemble a more mundane work of young adult fiction.

At times the book also threatens to devolve into a Caitlin Moran standup routine—the hilarity is so never-ending it borders on relentless and may tire some readers. Even when desperately sad, Johanna is funny. In a “fury of self-flagellation,” in which Johanna tries cutting herself, she compares her thigh to a piece of pork and references her “skills learned in the ‘Meat’ section of Dorothy Hartley’s ‘Food in England,” which she then quotes. This is the respect in which the book most departs from similarly honest but more serious young adult books, like those pioneered by Judy Blume. While this makes the book a particular joy to read, it does so in exchange for making Johanna a less vulnerable and relatable character than she could otherwise be.

Yet it feels unfair to fault the novel too harshly for its mirthfulness. After all, it is clearly in Johanna’s nature—and perhaps in Moran’s, too—to use humor to cope with sadness. It is through the specific style it utilizes in relating the experience of one girl that the book succeeds. “How to Build a Girl” is not the be-all and end-all of adolescent girl narratives, but it would be impossible for any one novel to merit that title. If “How to Build a Girl” begins a trend in the young adult genre of books that depict women from a diverse range of perspectives, the genre will be much better for it.