What do you do in your teenage years when you realise what your parents taught you wasn’t enough? You must go out and find books and poetry and pop songs and bad heroes - and build yourself.
It’s 1990. Johanna Morrigan, 14, has shamed herself so badly on local TV that she decides that there’s no point in being Johanna anymore and reinvents herself as Dolly Wilde – fast-talking, hard-drinking Gothic hero and full-time Lady Sex Adventurer! She will save her poverty stricken Bohemian family by becoming a writer – like Jo in Little Women, or the Brontes - but without the dying young bit.
By 16, she’s smoking cigarettes, getting drunk and working for a music paper. She’s writing pornographic letters to rock-stars, having all the kinds of sex with all the kinds of men, and eviscerating bands in reviews of 600 words or less.
But what happens when Johanna realises she’s built Dolly with a fatal flaw? Is a box full of records, a wall full of posters and a head full of paperbacks, enough to build a girl after all?
Imagine The Bell Jar written by Rizzo from Grease, with a soundtrack by My Bloody Valentine and Happy Mondays. As beautiful as it is funny, How To Build a Girl is a brilliant coming-of-age novel in DMs and ripped tights, that captures perfectly the terror and joy of trying to discover exactly who it is you are going to be.
I read Moran's two novels out of order, which didn't really seem to hinder my comprehension or enjoyment either way. (They both work as standalones.) I felt pretty much about this one as I felt about the other: it's very funny in a cheeky, irreverent way and compulsively readable. The 90s setting is rendered in a very robust, satisfying way. (I really love media set in the 90s, I guess because I was born in the mid-90s so don't actually remember any of that decade even though I feel I have a claim to it.) The writing itself isn't anything spectacular, and there's still the lingering "ironic" racism that is a cloud over Moran's work in general. I'd categorize this as a fun, feminist-adjacent vacation read, but nothing too intellectually strenuous. I bet the upcoming film will be really fun!
