Moran - How to Build a Girl

Contents

What do you do in your teenage years when you realise what your parents taught you wasnt enough? You must go out and find books and poetry and pop songs and bad heroes and build yourself.

Its 1990. Johanna Morrigan, 14, has shamed herself so badly on local TV that she decides that theres no point in being Johanna anymore and reinvents herself as Dolly Wilde fast-talking, hard-drinking Gothic hero and full-time Lady Sex Adventurer! She will save her poverty stricken Bohemian family by becoming a writer like Jo in Little Women, or the Bronts but without the dying young bit.

By 16, shes smoking cigarettes, getting drunk and working for a music paper. Shes writing pornographic letters to rock-stars, having all the kinds of sex with all the kinds of men, and eviscerating bands in reviews of 600 words or less.

But what happens when Johanna realises shes built Dolly with a fatal flaw? Is a box full of records, a wall full of posters and a head full of paperbacks, enough to build a girl after all?

Imagine The Bell Jar written by Rizzo from Grease, with a soundtrack by My Bloody Valentine and Happy Mondays. As beautiful as it is funny, How To Build A Girl is a brilliant coming-of-age novel in DMs and ripped tights, that captures perfectly the terror and joy of trying to discover exactly who it is you are going to be.

CAITLIN MORAN was brought up on a council estate in Wolverhampton where she was home-educated, wore a poncho and had boys throw stones at her whilst calling her a bummer. She published a childrens novel, The Chronicles of Narmo, at the age of 16, then became a columnist at The Times at the age of 18 which, yeah, looking back now is kind of weird. At one point she was Columnist, Interviewer and Critic of the Year so in your face, bummer boys.

Her multi-award-winning bestseller How To Be a Woman was published in 25 countries, was a New York Times bestseller and won the British Book Awards Book of the Year. Her second book, Moranthology, was a Sunday Times bestseller. With her sister, she co-writes the Channel 4 sitcom Raised by Wolves.

Caitlin lives on Twitter with her husband and two children, where she spends her time tweeting either about civil rights issues, or that picture of Bruce Springsteen when he was 25 and has his top off. She would like to be remembered as a very sexual humanitarian.

Non-fiction
How To Be A Woman
Moranthology

Childrens Fiction
The Chronicles of Narmo

To my mother and father, who thankfully are nothing like the parents in this book, and let me build my girl how I wanted.

This is a work of fiction. Real musicians and real places appear from time to time, but everything else, the characters, what they do and what they say, are the products of my imagination. Like Johanna I come from a large family, grew up in a council house in Wolverhampton and started my career as a music journalist as a teenager. But Johanna is not me. Her family, colleagues, the people she meets and her experiences are not my family, my colleagues, the people I met or my experiences. This is a novel and it is all fictitious.

I am lying in bed, next to my brother, Lupin.

He is six years old. He is asleep.

I am fourteen. I am not asleep. I am masturbating.

I look at my brother and think, nobly, This is what he would want. He would want me to be happy.

After all, he loves me. He wouldnt want me to be stressed. And I love him although I must stop thinking about him while Im masturbating. It feels wrong. I am trying to get my freak on. I cant have siblings wandering into my sexual hinterland. We may share a bed tonight he left his bunk at midnight, crying, and got in next to me but we cannot share a sexual hinterland. He needs to leave my consciousness.

I have to do this on my own, I say to him, firmly, in my head placing a pillow between us, for privacy. This is our little, friendly Berlin Wall. Sexually aware adolescents on one side (West Germany), six-year-old boys on the other (Communist Europe). The line must be held. It is only proper.

Its little wonder I need to masturbate today has been very stressful. The Old Man didnt get famous, again.

Missing for two days, he returned this afternoon, just after lunch, with his arm around a dishevelled young man, carbuncular, in a thin, grey, shiny suit and a pink tie.

This, cock, my father said, fondly, is our future. Say hello to the future, kidders.

We all politely said hello to the cock, our future.

In the hallway, our father informed us, in a cloud of Guinness, that he believed the young man was a record company talent scout, from London, called Rock Perry although he might also be called Ian.

We looked back at the man, sitting on our collapsing, pink sofa in the front room. Rock was very drunk. He had his head in his hands, and his tie looked like it had been put on by an enemy, and was strangling him. He didnt look like the future. He looked like 1984. In 1990, that was an ancient thing to be even in Wolverhampton.

Play this right, and well be fucking millionaires, our father said, in a loud whisper.

We ran into the garden, to celebrate me and Lupin. We swung on the swing together, planning our future.

My mother and my big brother Krissi, however, stayed silent. In our front room, they have seen the future come and go before. The future always has different names, and different clothes, but the same thing happens, time after time: the future only comes to our house when it is drunk. The future must then be kept drunk because the future must, somehow, be tricked into taking us with it, when it leaves. We must hide ourselves in the fur of the future, like burrs all seven of us and ride its ass, all the way out of this tiny house and back down to London, and fame, and riches, and parties, where we belong.

So far, this has never worked. The future has always, eventually, walked out of the door without us. We have been stuck now, on a council estate in Wolverhampton, for thirteen years waiting. Five children now the unexpected twins are three weeks old and two adults. We have to get out of here soon. God, we have to get out of here soon. We cannot hold on being poor, and not-famous, much longer. The 1990s are a bad time to be poor, and not-famous.

Back in the house, things are already going wrong. My mothers hissed instruction to me, Get in that kitchen, and bulk that bolognese out with peas! Weve got guests! means I have now served Rock a plate of pasta I curtsey a little, when I hand it over which he is shovelling into his mouth with all the passion of a man who desperately wants to sober up, aided only by petit pois.

With Rock trapped by the hot plate on his knees, my father is now standing, unsteadily, in front of him, doing his pitch. We know the pitch by heart.

You never say the pitch, the Old Man has explained, many times. You are the pitch. You live the pitch. The pitch is when you let them know youre one of them.

Looming over the guest, my father is holding a cassette in his hand.

Son, he says. Mate. Allow me to introduce myself. Im a man of taste. Not wealth. Not yet heh heh heh. And I have gathered you here today, to lay some truth on you. Because there are three men without whom none of us would be here today, he continues, trying to open the cassette box with booze-swollen fingers. The Holy Trinity. The alpha, epsilon and omega of all right-thinking people. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. The only three men Ive ever loved. The Three Bobbies: Bobby Dylan. Bobby Marley. And Bobby Lennon.