Caitln Moran has her sights set on blowing up feminism.

By SARAH LYALL

Caitlin Moran has a fantasy of the night she and her sister Caz win an Academy Award for the film adaptation of her book How to Be a Woman (in real life, they are still working on the screenplay). They are dressed for the occasion, but they are not wearing dresses. Weve made a pact that we will wear what we believe to be the greatest outfit of all time, which is the jumpsuit worn by the Ghostbusters, Moran said recently. We will both have the unlicensed nuclear accelerators on our backs those are the ghostthwarting devices and we will be the first women ever to win an award while wearing comfortable shoes. All the other women will be wearing stilettos that hurt. But we will go onstage in boots, and everyone will know that we are having the best time of anyone. How to boldly wear, do and write whatever you want while dealing with the traumas of growing up female and the burdens of others expectations is the premise of How to Be a Woman, a runaway hit in Britain that has just been released in the United States. Part memoir, part philosophical rant, part manifesto written with the lightest touch, the book aims to make women proud of being feminists, Moran said, and to show how all the lessons Ive learned actually make some progress. The wide range of topics covered include menstruation, sexism at work, the writing of Germaine Greer, cruddy boyfriends and how it doesnt matter if your breasts sag because the only people likely to see them are going to approach them in an attitude of immense gratefulness, i.e., hungry children and men who are about to get laid. The book begins in Wolverhampton, England, 24 years ago, on Morans 13th birthday. I am 13 stone (182 pounds), she writes. I have no money, no friends, and boys throw gravel at me when they see me. But this is no misery memoir, despite its obvious miseries, including a childhood featuring eight children (Moran was the oldest) chaotically crammed together in public housing. They were homeschooled, which essentially meant they
40

ran wild, and poor to the point that Moran wore her mothers hand-me-down underpants. Too bad, is her attitude. My core belief is that if youre complaining about something for more than three minutes, two minutes ago you should have done something about it, she said. As a child, she haunted the library, read about a book a day, mostly the autobiographies of writers, and dreamed of the Algonquin Round Table. Her break came in the form of a winning essay in a national writing competition, which in turn gave her a summer column in The Observer newspaper at 15. Two years later, she began working for The Times of London, where she has been a columnist, critic and feature writer ever since. Now 37, she has a cultlike following. Addressing in the book the vexing question of what to call your No. 1 vestibule your vagina she describes how she asked her 200,000-plus Twitter followers what they call theirs and immediately received more than 500 responses. (These included tuppence, cupcake and Birmingham City Center.) Interviewed at her home in North London, Moran talked the way she writes fast, hyperbolic, cheery, filled with swear words and sui generis slang and CAPITALS. She has a big cloud of dark hair with a dyed gray streak in the middle; she plans to reverse the colors when she turns 50. The word feminism, Moran said, has for some reason gone off the rails to connote, incorrectly, preachy humorlessness and grim separatism. When I talk to girls, they go, Im not a feminist, she said. And I say: What? You dont want to vote? Do you want to be owned by your husband? Do you want your money from your job to go into his bank account? If you were raped, do you still want that to be a crime? Congratulations: you are a feminist. She makes no apologies, even when describing the abortion she had when she became pregnant two years after having her second daughter with her husband, a rock critic. Everyone was like, Youve written a very brave book, Moran said. But Ive not done anything bad in that book. Every woman bleeds, every woman masturbates I hope. One in three women will have an abortion; everyones had a bad boyfriend; everyones had some kind of fantasy relationship in their head. But if we keep these things secret and dont talk about them publicly then that to me looks like the behavior of oppressed people. Before I wrote the book, I wondered: Am I going to get in trouble? Will I be perceived as a dirty woman? she went on. And you know what? Nothing bad happened, everyone liked it, it was fine. The secret is: You dont need to keep it secret.
Photograph by Levon Biss