How To Build a Girl

It’s not often that I read a book I deem so salacious and hilarious that I can’t read it in public. Recently I had such an experience. I was reading Caitlin Moran’s book, How To Build A Girl on the train to Toronto when I came to a section where Moran’s character describes trying to have sex with an overly well-endowed male.  Moran’s description was so explicit, and unbelievably funny, I had to close the book. Yet I also put the book aside because I sensed a tinge of sadness as her character contemplated why she was having sex with something so large it might possible leave her damaged.

How To Build a Girl is like this all the way through, wildly-entertaining, unabashedly honest in its depiction of female desire, vulgar, and shot through with feminist awakening. It’s exactly the kind of YA book I like to read, and the kind I hope teenage girls are sucking up. (As to whether it’s a YA book or not I haven’t been able to determine. It reads more like literary memoir to me, with an older character looking back on her misguided years, as opposed to a present tense, story-unfolding style I associate with YA books.)

How To Build a Girl is the story of Johanna Morrigan, an overweight, unattractive girl growing up in a poor family in the English Midlands in the 1990’s. Johanna wants to escape poverty and decides becoming a music critic is her best bet. She reinvents herself as Dolly Wilde, and then writes enough music pieces on spec until she’s hired by a music paper. Then Johanna goes about trying to have as many sexual adventures as she can, all with great lust, and rarely with a relationship in mind. While I kept waiting for pregnancy and STI’s to descend, this is not a cautionary tale, and none of the sexual morality I would feel compelled to write into a story occurs. Part of Moran’s freshness is her refusal to let the story wander into the clichéd territory of rags-to-riches tales. Johanna never gets skinny or has a great make-over, never becomes truly famous. I struggled with this; the Disney/Contemporary Magazine tropes are deeply imbedded in me, and although I knew I wanted Johanna to develop as a person, I couldn’t help wanting her to be a pretty face too. Physical transformation are so deeply attached to our ideas of mental betterment that they’re difficult to let go of. Yet what better message, what a more interesting story! Johanna's transformation is all about becoming a better writer and a better person.

Moran’s writing is bitingly funny, and endlessly inventive. She tackles taboo subjects with great verve. I’ll never look at my deodorant stick in exactly the same way.