So here’s the problem: I really liked Caitlin Moran’s newest book, How to Build a Girl. Her protagonist, Johanna Morrigan, is funny, interesting, smart, and complicated. Her insecurities and embarrassments and dreams are very real. She’s the sort of person a lot of nerdy girls can relate to: a lover of literature who always says the wrong thing at the wrong time, who tries to be humorous but no one ever understands what she’s saying.
Why is liking her book a problem? Well, the book’s content—in terms of language and sexual references—is quite graphic. Mere sentences into the book, there’s a masturbation scene. Johanna is rather obsessed with having sex. She even has a checklist of the different sorts of sex she wants to have, and we’re given explicit details of her attempts to meet each of those goals. Though Johanna’s family is, in many ways, wonderful—a set of intricate characters with complicated dynamics and great love—her father’s language is awful, from Chapter 1 on. So reading the book, despite all its strengths, became a rather cringe-worthy experience.
Johanna’s deep love and protective instinct toward her family is very clear throughout. They madden her at times, but she loves them passionately: loves them enough to try and provide for them in any way she can. She keeps reaching out to her brother, even when she thinks he doesn’t like her. She tries to take her mother’s place as head of the household and family cook, when her mother struggles with postpartum depression. It’s a story of deep family closeness, a struggle to unite a familial unit that is full of discord and passion and mystery.
There are also moments of deep wisdom: like when Johanna (and thus Moran) describes cultural cynicism—
It is a million times easier to be cynical and wield a sword, than it is to be open-hearted and stand there, holding a balloon and a birthday cake, with the infinite potential to look foolish… When cynicism becomes the default language, playfulness and invention become impossible. Cynicism scours through a culture like bleach, wiping out millions of small, seedling ideas… Cynicism means you presume everything will end in disappointment. And this, ultimately, is why anyone becomes cynical. Because they are fearful their innocence will be used against them—that when they run around gleefully trying to cram the whole world in their mouth, someone will try to poison them. Cynicism is, ultimately, fear. Cynicism makes contact with your skin, and a thick black carapace begins to grow—like insect armor. This armor will protect your heart from disappointment—but it leaves you unable to walk. You cannot dance in this armor. Cynicism keeps you pinned to the spot, in the same posture, forever.
Moran also includes some interesting philosophical concepts in the book: she takes the idea of the “self-made man,” and turns it into the literal quest of a teenage girl to “begat herself” anew. The book chronicles Johanna Morrigan’s journey into the new life of Dolly Wilde, a rather goth music journalist who has tons of sex, parties all the time, and writes scathing music reviews. It’s the story of a shy and embarrassed teenage girl who refuses to let her own nerdiness get in the way of becoming someone worthwhile, someone with a mission.
But, at the end of the book (SPOILER ALERT), Johanna doesn’t necessarily like Dolly Wilde. She likes parts of her, but realizes that parts of her alter-ego have also led her in a direction that wasn’t true to the original vision. And it’s here that Moran writes some of the most thoughtful and interesting words in her book:
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. That is the work of your teenage years—to build up and tear down and build up again, over and over, endlessly, like speeded-up film of cities during boom times and wars. To be fearless, and endless, in your reinventions—to keep twisting on nineteen, going bust, and dealing in again, and again. Invent, invent, invent.
This concept of personhood is rather interesting. Moran seems to believe that, in order to become a full “person,” we must be invented: that the raw materials that made up “Johanna” were not quite enough. She had to become Dolly Wilde—or, at least, Dolly Wilde was a rough draft of a better Johanna/Dolly who will emerge further down the road. We wonder throughout the book whether Moran is advocating for the natural innocence of Johanna, or for the powerful, self-created energy of Dolly—and I rather think that, in the end, Moran is advocating for neither: she is advocating for Johanna’s choice, to be whoever she wants to be.
But when we turn “choice” into a virtue, we remove a person’s ability to determine whether certain choices are right or wrong, wise or foolish. Johanna’s choice to become a writer is a good, inspiring choice. Her decision to find her own artistic style and flair is good. But Moran herself points out that these decisions have consequences. By the end of the book, we see that Johanna’s independence has not been without its costs (don’t want to spoil everything, but it does have repercussions on her family’s wellbeing). And this says nothing of the other choices Johanna makes, regarding sexual relationships and other wild lifestyle choices. Mightn’t they have consequences down the road? They seem to do some damage to Johanna’s usual chipper and delightful tone of writing, by the end of the book.
Johanna speaks with an incredibly humorous voice, but also with an incredibly vulnerable voice. “My biggest secret of all,” says Johanna, “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 me safe, and keep me lucky, and it’s too exhausting not to be.”
It seems that a lot of Johanna’s obsession with sex has to do with her insecurity, her desire to be seen. As Johanna says in one section of the book, “Here’s the amazing thing about sex: you get a whole person to yourself, for the first time since you were a baby. Someone who is looking at you—just you—and thinking about you, and wanting you…”
Doesn’t this describe the yearning of every teenage girl—if not every woman, really? To be seen, wanted, loved? For someone to look at you—“just you”? Moran taps into women’s secret longings and struggles—their yearning to be wanted and yet to also be authentic to oneself, to be winning and seductive yet also innocent and wide-eyed, to be self-inventing yet also “true to ourselves.” She captures all of this, through an imperfect story filled with crass humor and language. I wish that some of this crassness could’ve been left out, but know it’s an emblem of “realistic” writing in this day and age.
But mostly, I just wish that Johanna could’ve been confident and sexy and brilliant without the “self-invention” that seemed to guide her away from the innocent nerdiness of Johanna, and into the wild excesses of Dolly. I wish that Johanna, by the end of the book, could embrace a self that is neither self-begat into crudeness, nor entirely naïve. There’s truth in Moran’s words, when she writes that our teenage years are about taking ourselves—our raw material and history and quirks and talents—and asking the question, “Who am I?” But I think the answer to that question lies less in self-recreation, and more in self-cultivation: in taking the raw material, and using it to grow and build a future, rather than in creating an artificial shell, and pouring ourselves into it.
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