How to Build a Girl
How to Build a Girl • Book 1
by Caitlin Moran
Why You'll Love This
Reinventing yourself at fourteen by becoming a hard-drinking, Gothic rock critic is a terrible idea — and absolutely the right one.
- Great if you want: a messy, joyful portrait of self-invention through culture and chaos
- The experience: fast, funny, and electric — reads like the protagonist thinks, nonstop
- The writing: Moran writes with fearless specificity — crude, tender, and wickedly sharp
- Skip if: you prefer understated prose — this book is relentlessly, loudly itself
About This Book
Johanna Morrigan is fourteen, broke, and mortified—and she has decided that being herself simply isn't working. So she scraps the whole project and builds a new girl from scratch: Dolly Wilde, rock critic, Gothic heroine, and self-appointed Lady Sex Adventurer. Set in early-1990s Wolverhampton, Caitlin Moran's semi-autobiographical novel follows a teenager clawing her way out of a crowded, cash-strapped household and into the music press, armed with nothing but ferocious ambition and a library card's worth of borrowed ideas about who a person could be. It's funny in the way that only real desperation can be funny—and honest about the spectacular wreckage that comes from inventing yourself before you're quite ready.
What makes the book extraordinary is Moran's voice: propulsive, filthy, warm, and disarmingly self-aware, it reads less like fiction than like a letter from someone who survived something and wants you to know you will too. The prose never condescends to its teenage narrator, treating Johanna's mistakes with the full seriousness they deserve while also finding them genuinely hilarious. For readers who have ever constructed a persona out of desperation and held on for dear life, this one lands somewhere close to the bone.
