How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran

How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran

Now a major motion
picture starring Beanie Feldstein!

The New York Times bestselling author hailed as "the UK's answer to Tina Fey, Chelsea Handler, and Lena Dunham all rolled into one" (Marie Claire) makes her fiction debut with a hilarious yet deeply moving coming of age novel.

What do you do in your teenage years when you realize 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, fourteen, 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 Bröntes--but without the dying young bit.

By sixteen, 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 kinds of men, and eviscerating bands in reviews of 600 words or less.

But what happens when Johanna realizes 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. How to Build a Girl is a funny, poignant, and heartbreakingly evocative story of self-discovery and invention, as only Caitlin Moran could tell it.

The British Press Awards honored Caitlin Moran Columnist of the Year in 2010 and Critic and Interviewer of the Year in 2011 for her work in the Times of London. How to Be a Woman, her first book, earned the Galaxy Book of the Year Award in 2011 and became an instant New York Times bestseller. How to Create a Girl is her first novel since the one she wrote when she was fourteen years old, which does not count. Caitlin Moran can be followed on Twitter at @CaitlinMoran.