Caitlin Moran: My Sort of Woman
My mum first tells me about Caitlin Moran at a time when I’m an angsty teenager and I’m wondering if I’ve made the right decision to leave school and to put all my focus on learning everything at home. ‘Everything’ mainly being pursuing my love of the written word. I delight in devouring Shakespeare’s plays, sighing to the poetry of Edna St Vincent Millay and even beginning to grasp the finer points of grammar from errant apostrophes to dangling participles.
Mum explains that Caitlin was a home educated teenager like myself who loved to read and write and who gained no conventional qualifications. She wrote her first novel at 13, became a music journalist at 16 and then got hired by the Times when she was 18. Caitlin, then, becomes my mascot and beacon, someone who has paved the way for girls like me, passionate about literature and pop music, home schooled and focused on her writing. Yet she is someone I wouldn’t even recognise if I passed on the street at this point, as for some inexplicable reason, I don’t seek out her regular Times columns or even bother looking her up on the internet.
Even so, the little information I do have about her is both reassuring and validating. I think of her when at 16, I get the opportunity to write a regular magazine column on my unschooled life and decide to study a correspondence course in freelance journalism rather than A Levels. How reassuring it is to know that another home educated teenage girl felt brave enough to write about her unconventional experiences and background. That she was confident enough to pursue her love of the written word to the point where she had a book, a book published by the time she was 18. It still doesn’t occur to me to buy her book or use my allowance to subscribe to the Times for a regular Caitlin Dose.
When I finally read Caitlin’s writing, I am 22, my best friend gives me How to be a Woman for my birthday. I see posters of Caitlin’s screwed up, quirky facial expressions plastered on train station walls on nights out in London and Brighton. I am thrilled to finally have a chance to know more about this mysterious, vague woman I first heard about in my teens.
Reading How to be a Woman is like meeting a cheerful, slightly older woman who squeezes your hand warmly but firmly while making you a cup of hot tea and revealing all the secrets of modern womanhood, making you cry and laugh in equal measure and usually in the same breath. How to be a Woman is an invitation into Caitlin’s mind, revealing her earthy, hysterical humour, sometimes surreal whimsy and total honesty on a variety of topics, all from her perspective as a strident feminist w. She fiercely encourages the natural state of pubic hair, decries the fashion for smaller and smaller knickers and helps us realise the insidious ubiquitousness of sexism.
She normalises abortion to the point of making it an acceptable conversational topic and writes a gloriously accurate portrayal of ‘the girl matrix’, the state of dizzy, obsessive, over-analytical infatuation that most women fall into, before we’ve experienced the quiet bliss of being in a secure, mutually loving relationship.
Mum and I fight over the book, having to go into each other’s bedrooms and nab it while the other isn’t paying attention, just a little too British and self-conscious to read it together yet constantly reciting lines to each other and roaring with laughter. My best friend and I wipe tears from our eyes when applying The Girl Matrix vignette to our attitudes towards our respective, unrequited love affairs.
I wish I had kept a copy of this book in my handbag as a totem and talisman with me at all times throughout my twenties, rather than nearly always having to learn the hard way regarding bad decisions and worse boyfriends. If only I had been able to reach for this book and could have channeled Caitlin’s sharp wit when boys asked me to wear thongs, forgo condoms or wax parts of my body.
Yet Caitlin was still there, in my consciousness, making me realise that feminist and feminism were less dirty words, more vital vocabulary to overthrow the patriarchal status quo. Caitlin liberated me in so many other ways, even when misogynist norms dictated otherwise. Her stories of dating boys and flirting, however awkwardly or dizzily, encouraged me to flirt on my own terms, to ask guys out and risk being turned down. To wear outfits that made me feel attractive but more radically yet, comfortable, and to challenge advances that made me feel anxious or uncertain.
In How to be a Woman, no topic was too taboo for Caitlin, which actively encouraged conversations between my girlfriends and I about things with which we would previously have struggled, such as body image or masturbation. She also shared that the right relationship would mean you disappear for a while, return a while later, glowing, bright eyed, probably a little heavier and that you would never obsess about the right person, in the way that you do with the ones who hook you like amphetamines, leaving you shaky, sleep-deprived and in desperate need of rehab.
So Caitlin becomes more of a fixture in my twenties, not a vague symbol like in my teens, but a woman about whom I now know intimate details. She talks from her own perspective with the cheerful, knowledgeable tone of a big sister. I can see her in my mind’s eye, raising a skeptical eyebrow when I eschew comfortable underwear in favour of floss-like lingerie.
And, now, as I find my groove as a slightly older and more experienced, happily married woman, she releases the book that I think might be her best yet, ‘More than a Woman’. No spoilers as my mum is currently reading it and she is editing this blog, just like Caitlin’s mum did for her. See, she and I are clearly related, at least on a soul level, not that she needs another sibling, she has seven.
This book is a gift to the world in our conflicted, confused and confusing, endlessly messy state and I end up reading it aloud to John (husband), because I cannot keep the mirth and tears to myself.
Here she is, taking on topics as heavy as her daughter’s eating disorder to the importance of a hilariously described maintenance shag, to an incredibly important chapter on toxic masculinity. Her ability to keep topics so broad and diverse, and her capacity to make you smile even through the tears is astonishing. I practically snort the book, tearing John away from whatever he is doing just so I can get to the next page.
After we finish it, we watch various Youtube interviews with her and I finally know what this woman looks and sounds like when she’s talking. Almost immediately I can see the cheerful puffin resemblance to which she aspires, with her winged eyeliner, ‘embiggened hair’ and brightly coloured clothes. She talks at 1000 miles per hour and, as in her columns and books, seeks to cover as much ground as she possibly can.
Watching these clips and catching up on her now classic Twitter feed which features as an A level literary text, I finally see Caitlin as the whole, animated human that she is, not just a vague home education success story, which although it brought me huge comfort in my teen years, hardly said anything about the type of person that Caitlin Moran is. Not just a kindred spirit who validated both my love for female-written classic literature, mid twentieth century musicals and for contemporary rock music, but as someone much greater than the sum of her parts.
Caitlin’s writing often breathes fresh life into conventional platforms like the Times and her books fizz with her electric, bubbly energy when addressing anything from politics to sex to the natural world. Her stand-up comic level of humour bounces off the page, causing helpless laughter at her turn of phrase and unfettered whimsy. Equally, she can be so poignant and moving that it is hard not to tear up. And she does all this while also ladling out heaps of common sense when it comes to political, social and environmental issues; her radical example giving me confidence and courage to accept and own my cheerfulness, wide-eyed idealism and utopian perspectives, as well as my good relationship with my body.
These days I often hear Caitlin’s voice in my head telling me to go for it when I have the urge to wild-swim, to buy the comfy clothes over the sexy binding items and finally relaxing into the notion that having big hair is aspirational rather than a fashion from a bygone era, e.g. the 80s (v. soothing when you have hair as abundant as mine).
More profoundly, Caitlin’s words, written or spoken, encourage me to not only be more self accepting, but even own my truest self. Caitlin also reminds me that success can be because of, rather than in spite of, unconventional backgrounds, that surrounding yourself with people who make you laugh, are respectful and kind are to be prioritised above all else. And that you really do know if you are in the right romantic relationship when you are bright-eyed and glowing from the inside, perhaps a little heavier, much more relaxed and and a whole lot happier.
Recommendations:
How to be a Woman, Caitlin Moran
Caitlin Moran reads: A letter to teenage girls
Caitlin Moran’s Life in Objects
More than a Woman, Caitlin Moran
Caitlin Moran on Twitter
