“There is no academy where you can learn to be yourself; there is no line manager slowly urging you toward the correct answer. You are midwife to yourself, and will give birth to yourself, over and over, in dark rooms, alone.”
New York Times bestselling author Caitlin Moran first got my attention with her book How To Be a Woman, an auto-biographical collection of satire and humor about what it means to be a woman. Offering insight and observation on female rights and empowerment, Moran’s writing is always provocative and hilarious. How to Build a Girl is no exception.
How to Build a Girl is the semi-autobiographical fictional counterpart to Moran’s previous collection of personal essays, based on her riotous teenage years. The novel is an honest depiction of an awkward teenage girl’s journey to become someone bold and new, from dropping out of school, to discovering the majesty of punk rock (along with cigarettes, alcohol and sex), to becoming an unlikely and notable music critic, to finally transforming into exactly who she always wanted to be. But the road there is not an easy one.
When Johanna, a 14-year-old girl living in a small flat in England with her poverty-stricken parents and siblings humiliates herself publicly, she decides the only thing to do is to reinvent herself. In order to save her family from destitution and herself from a life of boredom, Johanna transforms into the smoking, drinking, promiscuous, infamous music critic, Dolly Wilde. However, during her late nights, long travels and road to self-realization, she discovers she reinvented herself with a fatal flaw that might not be so easy to fix.
How to Build a Girl is a very honest, very heartfelt journey of a young woman trying to do what’s right not just for her family and her future, but for her very soul. Every experience she has is a step towards becoming the person she wants to be, but with every step away from who she was, it becomes harder to find her way back to the people and places she called home. A love letter to rebellion and defining yourself, this edgy novel about a girl becoming a woman on her own terms is a brilliant work of fiction that leaves you hopeful and enlightened to the struggle of identity and authority.
“What do you do when you build yourself—only to realize you built yourself with the wrong things? You rip it up and start again.”
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