How to be Famous
How to Build a Girl • Book 2
by Caitlin Moran
Why You'll Love This
Caitlin Moran makes 1994 London feel like the most alive place on earth — and then makes you ache for everything fame costs.
- Great if you want: a sharp, funny heroine navigating ambition, desire, and belonging
- The experience: fast, warm, and bittersweet — reads like a brilliant friend oversharing
- The writing: Moran's prose is wildly funny and then quietly devastating, sometimes mid-sentence
- Skip if: you haven't read How to Build a Girl — context matters here
About This Book
It's 1994, London is buzzing with Britpop, and Johanna Morrigan—the irrepressible, oversharing, big-dreaming teenager from How to Build a Girl—is back. She has a flat, a byline at a cool music magazine, and a front-row seat to the era's defining cultural moment. What she doesn't have is her best friend, who has just become famous, which turns out to be its own kind of heartbreak. Moran plants a deceptively simple question at the center of the book: what happens to the people left behind when someone they love ascends to a different reality? The answer is funnier, messier, and more emotionally honest than you might expect.
Reading Moran is like getting a very long, very good letter from someone who notices everything and is constitutionally incapable of being boring about it. Her prose moves at the speed of thought—digressive, electric, full of opinions delivered with the confidence of someone who has earned them. The novel's real pleasures are in the texture of the writing: the sharp cultural commentary, the warm absurdism, and Johanna's voice, which manages to be simultaneously ridiculous and completely right about everything that matters.
