How to Build a Girl readalong - the conclusion

This readalong is hosted by Emily at As the Crowe Flies (and reads)

In the final part of How To Build a Girl comes the moment we've all been dreading: the point in which Johanna, as Dolly Wilde, attempts to let her father's demo tape loose on the world. It goes about as well as one might expect in the magazine whose staff take much more pleasure in tearing bands down than building them up. I hadn't come to like Dolly or her father all that much but still I felt a pain watching her brutal disillusionment.

In this part, entitled Rip it Up and Start Again, the Dolly Wilde image Johanna has worked so hard to construct, comes crashing down. She finally realises that her boyfriend Tony Rich is just using her, and she is worth more than that! Good for her.

But all her vicious reviews come back to bite her on the backside when she comes face to face with those artists she has insulted. Suddenly she realises the hurtful power of her words. "The indie-rock world is a small world, and I soon realise I have insulted around a third of it." At this point, we are reminded that Johanna is only seventeen and quite naive, and never expected her reviews to actually reach those she wrote about. Why should these big rock bands care what this kid from Wolverhampton thinks? (I suppose on a smaller scale it's like writing a book blog and discovering the authors of the books read my reviews. That's always a bit of a shock even though I post my thoughts on the internet for the world to see.)

We find out why the family's benefits have been cut, and ironically it's because Johanna left school to start work to try to improve the financial situation. It's a lot of pressure to ask a kid to be the main breadwinner for both parents and four brothers, and I'm still not sure how it can make sense to get more income from not working than from working. Still, at least Johanna is doing okay with her journalism, despite the Dolly Wilde fiasco, getting a chance to start over at a different magazine and do what she went into the business to do. There was a lovely conversation between Johanna and her mum, which reminds us that though the family is a big messed-up unit, they all love each other and that's what's important. And it turns out that John Kite is not a creep at all, but is the charming kindred spirit Johanna believed him to be. I'm glad of that. But the epilogue with Dadda shows that he hasn't changed one bit since the beginning, still thinks he's about to be a big rock star. I guess it's good to end on a note of hope, even if it's a false hope - I was glad to be spared the agony of seeing his dreams destroyed, but it's frustrating to see a character staying exactly the same from the start of a novel to the end. learning nothing.

Overall I've enjoyed reading this book, and in such good company too, but I confess round about part four I began to get a bit impatient when the plot started to tail off and turn into Moran's journalistic musings. Still, it was a highly enjoyable novel, laugh-out-loud funny but with thought-provoking social commentary. Moran doesn't beat us around the head with the messages in the book, but prompts us to think about what we take away from the reading. 

Thanks again to Emily for organising this readalong. It's been good fun.

Key Quotes:

"I just thought, like, their press officers put it in a box and it just kind of stayed there, and they just carried on doing what they're doing, and we carry on doing what we're doing, and we all know it's just some fun, I was just riffing, I mean, why do they care what I think?"

"I'm not... your bit of rough. You're... my bit of posh."

How To Build A Girl readalong: Part four

Chapters 16-20

This readalong is hosted by Emily at As The Crowe Flies (And Reads.)

When we last saw Johanna Morrigan, a highly respected critic had given her a dangerous new element to add to the recipe for "Dolly Wilde": the label Trouble. Yes, she likes that label, and proceeds to live up to this reputation as well as she can. Her fangirl gushing has gone out of her window and her writing becomes vicious, tearing the bands she reviews to shreds all over the national music magazines. Outside of work, she embarks upon satisfying her curiosity about... other matters... and perhaps I brought a different set of values to the reading of this section than Moran put in, but I felt that "Dolly" was heading down a self-destructive road, sleeping with people who had no real interest or respect for her. I feared she would end up getting hurt.

I confess I'm not sure that I like this new Dolly very much, and she irritated me a lot in her conversation with her brother when she told him she'd love a gay friend - like a trendy new accessory - but not Kenny from the magazine, because he's "the wrong kind of gay." Johanna hasn't figured it out yet, but if you've read the cover blurb, and probably even if you haven't, her big mouth is being all kinds of offensive towards her closeted brother. Just shut up already! (I know I'm being very harsh on a tactless teenager, probably because she reminds me of some of the worst parts of myself at the same age.)

Most of this week's section dealt with Johanna's outrageous and hilarious musings about her new voyage of discovery. Here the plot started to fizzle out a bit, Moran's usual style of entertaining journalistic anecdotes taking over. Yes, these were fictional rather than autobiographical (though I continue to wonder how much of her own experience informed this book) but structurally, the writing didn't feel like the end of the second act of a novel. It becomes a string of laugh-out-loud funny incidents (and a Star Trek reference that had me longing for the brain bleach.)

The last chapter of Section Two culminates in a big, angry rant about why this working-class girl feels the need to write such brutal reviews of music, about power and revenge and voice - and then the monologue changes to something else, a retrospective look at how, actually, this isn't her role after all... that she got into music because she loved it, and somewhere along the way she missed the point of it all and could be responsible for destroying the very thing that she loved. Again, this is very Moran, very passionate and moving - but I thought it was quite weak for fiction, as the epiphany happens as retrospective prose rather than as action. It read like journalism.

After several chapters of lots of incidents, lots of pondering, but not a lot of plot development, Moran ends the section on a whammy of a cliffhanger that made me very worried indeed.

That's the one positive thing about being so young. You've got plenty of time left to make things right.

Except, as it turns out, I haven't got plenty of time.

What do we think, guys? What dramatic circumstances are going to shatter Johanna's naive youthful delusion of immortality? A terminal illness - for her or a loved one? A car crash, caused by her father's drink-driving? Or is she going to lose her job, her reputation and her security? Part three is entitled "Rip It Up And Start Again," so my money is on the Dolly Wilde image coming crashing down, repercussions from all her negative reviews and wild behaviour.

Key Quotes

"This is not my first time at a rock star bath-party."

"Because rich people, powerful people, cool people or the kind of swaggering men that form these bands, are the kind of people who would usually look down on a fat teenage girl from a council estate, and in the one place I am more powerful than them - the pages of D&ME - I want my revenge - revenge on behalf of all the millions of girls like me."

"For when cynicism becomes the default language, playfulness and invention become impossible."

How To Build A Girl readalong: Part three

Chapters 11-15

This readalong is hosted by Emily at As The Crowe Flies (and Reads.)

When we last saw Johanna Morrigan, AKA Dolly Wilde, she had just been assigned an interview with musician John Kite, all expenses paid, in Dublin. This is her first time on a plane, first time out of the country, and she loves it. She meets Kite and finds him a real kindred spirit, someone who she can really relax around, have fun with, and she ends up besotted. John Kite seems charming enough, in a drunken-rock-star sort of way, but I don't trust him. I don't trust him at all. I feel sure that he's going to betray "Dolly" in some way and break her heart, turn out not to be the person she thinks he is.

Back in England, disaster strikes when her father receives an ominous brown envelope informing him that his claim for disability benefit is being investigated, and the family get a reduction of 11% in their income. 11% may not sound like the end of the world, but for a family with five children who have no luxuries, no savings, they just can't spare that money! "Dolly's" payment for her writing is slow to arrive, and after her first major feature turned out to be a page of gushing fangirling, the work dries up.

Her father makes another attempt at getting his music noticed, but I can't help but feel that if he is too sick to work a regular job - even a part-time one - would he be able to deal with the demands of working as a musician? I think he views "being a rock star" as an easy way out of his desperate situation, without thinking through the reality of the hard work required. Johanna is the only earner of the family: what about the mother, or the eldest brother? But it is easy to say "get a job!" yet last week we saw the extended family all made redundant by Mrs Thatcher's slashing of British industry. Just like today, the jobs just aren't there! 

Still, "Dolly" eventually gets another phone call from the magazine and she goes back to London for some more work, where she gets some gentle pointers as to where she went wrong with the Kite article. She despairs for a moment when her teenage years of musical education just don't seem to be enough, and timidly asks if she can claim expenses for borrowing CDs for the library at 20p per time.

In reply she is told that all she has to do is phone up the record companies and get as much music as a person can handle for free, and even sell the CDs on afterwards: a tidy business plan that could solve all the family's troubles - or at least help a little. Then, on to her first music-industry party, where she pulls out all the stops in making herself seem as fun and quirky and loud as possible. I was cringing on her behalf at times - there is nothing less British than obviously trying too hard.

Still, her colleagues seem to find her amusing rather than embarrassment, and as she got into the character I found myself laughing aloud. I loved the scene with her carefully calculating how to not look like a pig at the buffet table, making up a fictional friend who liked different food from herself, then leaving the loathed scotch eggs in the ladies' room with an explanation that they were dragon eggs, about to hatch! (Query: is what she did really that different from pretending you're not home alone when you order a massive pizza and lots of sides from Domino's? I suspect it isn't.)

Key Quotes:

I don't want anyone watching me change. I will do all my changing in private. In public, I am, always, the finished thing. The right thing, for the right place. A chrysalis is hung in the dark.

I am getting incredibly high on a single, astounding fact: that it's always sunny above the clouds. Always. That every day on Earth - every day I have ever had - was, secretly, sunny, after all.

The house is too small, and nothing happens, and I will never be older than twelve here.

(Minor grumble: in typing up these quotes, I found myself wondering whether Moran really needs all those commas.)

How To Build A Girl readalong: Part two

Chapters 5-10

This readalong has been organised by Emily at As The Crowe Flies (and Reads.)

Part one of How To Build A Girl ends on a very melodramatic note. After embarrassing herself on live TV, Johanna Morrigan dolefully concludes: "There are no two ways about it: I am going to have to die." Dun dun DAAAH! In part two, she is swift to clarify matters. She's not actually going to commit suicide. "I don't want to not live. I just don't want to be me any more. Everything I am is not working."

Oh man! As fiction it reads quite lightly, an amusing anti-climax: okay, I said I'm going to die but I don't actually mean die. However, it speaks to a feeling that comes right from the gut, a dissatisfaction I know all too well, and I am twice Johanna's age.

Instead, Johanna goes about reinventing her image as the dark and mysterious Dolly Wilde, named after a scandalous niece of Oscar. I'm not sure how one can use the name Dolly nowadays without bringing to mind a very specific Dolly! But Johanna, or Dolly, takes this transformation very seriously, and I really enjoyed reading about her inspiration collage on her wall. It's the sort of thing I'd have done at that age, though I was always dissatisfied with the results - they never looked as cool as the things my friends from real life, film and TV would come up with. "Dolly" is a very deliberate, studied effort at constructing a new personality, as the book's title implies. I think we all do that to a certain extent, according to where we are. Am I the earnest book-lover on a quest for knowledge, or the out-and-out geek girl? Yes.

So Johanna decides to become a music journalist - only problem being that she doesn't know a thing about music. Not that this stops her! I felt her awkwardness as she tried to get into her goth cousin's group, or browse a non-HMV record shop which seems as girl-friendly as the comic book store of The Big Bang Theory. I remember how as a teenager, your music tastes defined you, marked you out as cool or not. (Confession: I was obsessed with Boyzone.) Actually, in my experience I felt far more accepted among the goths and skaters than I did among the "ordinary" kids at school, even at fourteen, and the Hobbit in Southampton was the first pub I ever felt comfortable in.

Still, Johanna is nothing if not determined, and builds up her music knowledge with records ordered from the library and listening to John Peel on the radio, and eventually walks into the coveted job at the age of sixteen, with no qualifications.

We finally find out about Johanna's dad's disability - he was seriously injured in his work as a fireman. I wonder if Moran deliberately delayed telling us the details to challenge our reactions: though I fought against it, I did catch a treacherous thought crossing my mind: "so he's heroically disabled, that's all right then." PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE, PEOPLE! How does one earn one's right to be "deserving" poor, anyway? (Possibly not through drink-driving. These scenes made me very nervous.)

Johanna began her writing career as a means to "save" her family from poverty and disrepute, and yet even this early on I can see her getting caught up in her work and losing sight of her noble aims. Perhaps it's not surprising - she is sixteen, and probably every sixteen-year-old wants to put distance between themselves and their parents. I was cringing on her behalf when her drunken father came backstage to meet the Smashing Pumpkins with her. But I can see this independence becoming a huge source of conflict later on.

Key Quotes:

I am my own imaginary friend.

 Sometimes, and suddenly, these barrages of me-excluding noise part to reveal things I find astonishingly beautiful, and useful to me and my heart, in their current position.

We are not just poor people who have not yet evolved into something else: i.e.: people with money. We are something else - just as we are.

I can see where I have drawn Dolly Wilde on top of my own face - the two uneasily co-existing - but perhaps others can't.

How to Build A Girl readalong: Part one

So, today marks the first update post for the How To Build A Girl readalong! Hello to you all.

The novel starts memorably, to say the least! I read Part One on the train, and found myself glancing behind me to check no curious fellow passengers were reading over my shoulder.

Moran writes about young female sexuality in as frank and unabashed a manner as I don't, and shames me a bit for blushing. The subject is tackled in a very matter-of-fact way, not to shock or titillate or giggle, but simply to challenge taboos or double standards. So go Caitlin.

So our heroine, Johanna, is fourteen years old and part of a big, dysfunctional family. Her mum is suffering from post-natal depression after the birth of "Unexpected Twins," and the father receives disability benefits and is convinced he's going to be the next great rock star. It seems quite clear that his idea of his own talent is somewhat delusional - the description of his demo cassette makes it sound arty and weird and terrible.

When Johanna accidentally lets slip to an elderly neighbour that her dad receives benefits, the sniffy reaction - very much a "he doesn't look like there's anything wrong with him... why, I saw him cleaning his car just last week" - makes her terrified that the neighbour will report the family and all the family's support will be taken away. A child should not have to worry about this sort of thing. This novel may be set at the back end of the Thatcher years, and yet nothing has changed. There is a passage describing how Johanna's father will play up his disability because "people have different perceptions of what disability is." A cursory glance at Caitlin Moran's Twitter feed will show how this is a subject close to her heart, with statistics of thousands of people dying after being declared "fit for work." She treats the subject with elements of humour, but underneath it is a real sadness and anger that the most vulnerable members of society are those hit the hardest.

After her gaffe and weeks of terror, Johanna tries to make some money with her writing, enters and wins a poetry competition. As well as the prize money, she appears on live TV and, as one might expect, proceeds to humiliate herself with a Scooby-Doo impression. It makes sense in context... but is by no means anything resembling a good idea in anyone's mind ever. Oh, the awkwardness of being a teenager, of saying something that seems funny at the time. (If only it was limited to the teenage years!) Moran captures that embarrassment so well, that feeling that the whole world is pointing and laughing and will never grow tired of doing so.

Key Quotes:

He didn't look like the future. He looked like 1984. In 1990, that was an ancient thing to be - even in Wolverhampton.

"We lie in the shallow depression her ghost left behind," I sometimes think, in my more maudlin moments. "I am born into a nest of death."

Today, like every other day, I'm going to bed still a fat virgin who writes their diary in a series of imaginary letters to sexy Gilbert Blythe from Anne of Green Gables."*




*Of course any Anne references count as key quotes.

Readalong: How to Build A Girl - intro post.

Hello all! Caitlin Moran's shiny new green novel was published in the UK last week, and after dithering about whether or not to buy a copy, I read about four different posts from my favourite bloggers all signing up for a readalong, organised by Emily at As The Crowe Flies (And Reads), which will take place over the next few weeks. The next day the book somehow fell off the shelves at work and came home with me. Curious!

For those of you who are new to me and my blog: hello! I am a twentymumble-year-old geek girl living on the Isle of Wight, and I work in a bookshop, which is awfully convenient for my book addiction and not terribly good for my bank account. I'm sure my employers are supposed to be giving me money rather than the other way round.

I've taken part in a couple of readalongs before, most recently The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, which was great fun, and I really enjoyed sharing thoughts with my fellow bloggers at various stages of the book, although my posts were sadly gif-less. I shall make up for this oversight with plenty of nerdy gifs for How To Build A Girl, I promise.

I confess I'm not what you'd call a fan of Caitlin Moran. It's not that I'm not a fan, so much as that she's someone whose awesomeness I know from everyone else. I enjoyed her books - How To Be A Woman, which made me giggle embarrassingly in public places - but haven't had much to do with her as a public figure. (Cue everyone descending on me to tell me what I'm missing.) Judging from her non-fiction work, I'm expecting How to Build A Girl to be outrageously funny, sarcastic and passionately feminist. I also suspect it will be difficult to limit myself to reading just a few chapters per week.

The Schedule:

July 7th (or 9th in my case): Introductions
July 14: Part 1
July 21: Part 2 - chapters 5-10
July 28: Part 2 - chapters 11-15
Aug 4:  Part 2 -chapters 16-20)

Aug 11: Part 3 and wrap-up

Let the readalong commence!