How To be A Woman by Caitln Moran - review by Nicky Pellegrino

While I consider myself a feminist, usually I’d run a mile from books on the subject suspecting they’re all dreary, disapproving rants. But then my UK-based Facebook friends started talking about How To be A Woman by Caitln Moran (Ebury Press, $37.99). And since it’s been a stayer in the Amazon top ten, I had to check it out.

All I can say is Moran is some sort of genius. She’s managed to redefine feminism both thoughtfully and hilariously, producing a book that women will actually want to read on a topic we all thought we’d heard enough about. Also if there were prizes for the quirkiest use of slang words to describe a vagina it would definitely win one.

Moran is a well-known newspaper columnist in the UK and her style is confessional and confronting so letting her loose on an entire book about feminism was bound to be provocative. What she’s come up with is part memoir, part polemic and one of the funniest things I’ve read in ages.

It opens in 1988 as Moran turns 13. The eldest of eight kids growing up in a cramped council house, she’s far from ready for what happens next – body hair, periods, stretch marks, boobs, a sudden fascination with the naughty passages in books.

As she takes us along on her journey to womanhood, Moran shares a whole lot of her opinions too, verbalising stuff women tend to think but rarely get round to saying, and doing it so much better than most of us would. From female fantasies to the tyranny of waxing, childbirth to abortion, Botox to designer handbags, she is gobby, stroppy, shockingly honest, wonderfully wise and armed with a fund of great one-liners.

Take the long and very funny section on the trend for the Brazilian and the sudden unacceptability of a natural pelt pubic hair. “I am aware that my views on waxing run contrary to current thinking,” Moran tells us. “As far as public hair is concerned, I am like someone in a pub, tearfully recalling how exciting it was to go into Woolworths and buy the new Adam Ant single on seven inch vinyl. I am ‘vagina retro’.”

While it’s all outrageously good fun there were times to be honest when I wanted a little less feminist diatribe and a little more Caitlin, to hear what her pithy sister Caz might have to say on any given subject, know more about her family, her dating disasters and how on earth she managed to score a job on one of Britain’s coolest music papers at the age of 16. Somehow Moran manages to be incredibly upfront about her personal life and yet still left me wanting more.

I’m also not convinced I buy into her theory that what women want and need is to be treated like one of The Guys or that sexism is just another form of bad manners.

But I love how she writes about the important  – and the less important – stuff in a way that’s barstool chatty, making it utterly approachable and easy to read. This is a book that needed to be written. Share it with your book club, give it to your teenage daughter…or son for that matter. In fact, any man who complains of not having a clue what goes on in women’s heads should be presented with his own copy.

I finished How To Be A Woman wondering if there was any way I could possibly make Caitlin Moran be my friend. I’m working on this. 


Footnote:
Nicky Pellegrino is a succcesful Auckland-based author of popular fiction, The Italian Wedding was published in May 2009, Recipe for Life was published in April, 2010, while her latestThe Villa Girls, was published in April this year.

She is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above review was first published on 31 July, 2011