Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Read How to Build a Girl Instead

How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran

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Caitlin Moran is a British culture writer/arts reporter/ feminist thinker, and How To Be A Woman is her 2011 memoir/ collection of feminist essays that had been sitting on my shelf for far too long.  How To Be a Woman is structured as both a chronological progression of Moran’s life events and a feminist opinion tied to that event (ie: the first chapter is “I Start Bleeding”, which is both an account of her first period, as well as a discussion on masturbation, women and […]

If you invented modern fame from scratch, now, and told people what it would consist of, they would think you were crackers.

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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

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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.

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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

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“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 […]

I would go out tonight but I haven’t got a stitch to wear

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So I peer beyond the parapet of middlebrow interwar women’s writing and detective fiction to tackle something that’s very new but set in the very early nineties, a story about a girl who’s too big, too bright, and–at times–too brave. Moran’s pragmatic, if sometimes problematic, brand of feminism informs How to Build a Girl, which works to some extent as a companion piece to the early Adrian Mole books–it’s peculiarly British, and it’s about teenage lust, angst, dysfunctional families and communities, and poverty. It is […]



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