How to Build a Girl

byCaitlin Moran, Louise Brealey (Read by)

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What do you do in your teenage years when you realise what your parents taught you wasn’t enough? You must go out and find books and poetry and pop songs and bad heroes - and build yourself.

It’s 1990. Johanna Morrigan, 14, has shamed herself so badly on local TV that she decides that there’s 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 Brontes - but without the dying young bit.

By 16, she’s smoking cigarettes, getting drunk and working for a music paper. She’s 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 she’s 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.

Rude, big-hearted, wise-cracking novel
Christina Patterson, The Sunday Times

Moran also writes brilliantly about music, and especially about what music can do. She carries Johanna through this novel with incredible verve, extravagant candour, and a lot of heart. Johanna is … a wonderful heroine. A heroine who cares, who bravely sallies forth and makes things happen, who gives of herself, who is refreshingly unashamed. She’s so confident, it’s glorious
The Independent on Sunday

About Caitlin Moran

Caitlin Moran is the eldest of eight children, home educated on a council estate in Woverhampton. She published her first novel at 16 and became a columnist at The Times at 18. She has won Columnist of the Year seven times and has also been named Interviewer and Critic of the Year. Her million-selling groundbreaking feminist memoir How to be a Woman was voted one of the Sunday Times ‘Most Important Books of the Twenty-First Century’.

Caitlin's other books have also been bestsellers and How to Build a Girl was made into a film with Beanie Feldstein and Emma Thompson. Her Channel 4 sitcom Raised by Wolves, co-written with her sister Caroline Moran, won a Rose d’Or for Best Sitcom. Her Who’s Who entry lists her interests as 'cava, eyeliner, hair embiggening, and The Struggle'.

She lives in North London with her husband and two children, and, after following all her own advice, she really is hopeful now.

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