The Almighty Caitlin Moran Stops Me Watching Wimbledon!

I spent the weekend with a friend having our ten year reunion of our graduation. My university years came late in life and were very unexpected because in the space of 12 weeks I had met a man, married him, moved over 100 miles away from home and started a university course in English. The women I met there were incredible life-long friends but my teenage years were spent partying, jumping from job to job and travelling from gig to gig. It seemed fitting that I celebrated both exciting parts of my life this weekend by meeting my uni friends and reading Caitlin Moran’s ‘How to be a Girl’ set firmly in the music scene of the 1990s.

This new novel, clearly based on her first years as a music critic was quite simply unputdownable and that isn’t even a word. I rested on Sunday after the big get-together on the Saturday and finished it although I’d only started the night before. Not only did it stop me watching the Wimbledon final; I had forgotten it was on at all! The first night I went to bed late, and worried that my friend would think I was mental as I giggled, guffawed and sniggered under the quilt trying not to disturb my fellow house guests. I was hysterical with laughter at her descriptions of her Irish family as they reminded me a bit of mine and I would have been a similar age at a similar time. We were also a cash strapped family, getting our music and books from the library and I also wanted to be a writer. I didn’t have the nerve and determination that Caitlin Moran had, and I admired her for it. Her mistakes and exploits during this time were funny but also had that cringe-worthy aspect of a teenager being completely out of her depth. Moran also doesn’t pull punches about what it’s like to be a woman; the story of her cystitis bath party is both excruciating (because we all know what it’s like) and hilarious. I was moved by the character’s immediate love for John Kite and her descriptions of the way she feels when she’s with him are beautiful and romantic. It is like she finds her real home because he gets her completely.

I spent an awfully long time trying to imagine who people were by remembering back to the big indie music stars of the 1990s. It reminded me of my own love of Blur, Pulp (who I saw at Alexandra Palace in 1994) and also more obscure choices such as the Milltown Brothers whose EP I played and also my favourite Cocteau Twins album Heaven or Las Vegas. Her descriptions of playing Twin Peaks with her brother was funny and I remembered by own obsession with the series that I used to watch with my best friend Elliot every Tuesday night with chocolate ice-cream and Boaster cookies. The fashion descriptions were also nostalgic for me and I still wear a lot of the same things from my 90s wardrobe such as the Doc Martens, the velvet jackets and the long indie girl skirts.

Caitlin Moran is one of my feminist heroines. She is not frightened of taking some of the most private experiences of being a woman and putting them out there in an honest and ballsy way. This novel was heartwarming, intriguing, nostalgic and completely hilarious. I was sad to finish and immediately wanted to read it all over again. This is a five star book from a five star writer and later on, when I happened to see News at Ten I saw that it had been the Wimbledon final and not only did I realise I’d forgotten, I realised I didn’t care.