Caitlin Moran's book How To Build A Girl is a fantastic story. It is set in the early 1990s and starts out with our main character, the wildly ambitious Johanna Morrigan, living in a cramped council flat with her family.
Johanna is extremely frustrated and dissatisfied with her life and also herself, so much so that she decides to reinvent herself as her confident alter-ego Dolly Wilde. This is where the title of the novel comes into play. In the process of dismantling Johanna Morrigan and building Dolly Wilde in her place, she is quite literally building herself as the kind of girl she aspires to be, and whom it may just be possible to become. Her reinvented self is crazy and cool and charismatic. We watch as Johanna Morrigan's Dolly Wilde's appetite for excitement and adventure gradually grows more and more until eventually she leaves her family, becomes a music journalist and travels down to London.
It is in London where Dolly is met with a barrage of new experiences. She is suddenly thrust into the male-orientated world of music journalism where she is the only female who works at the magazine that she writes for, and also the youngest person there by far. Due to this, she is incredibly vulnerable and also thrown into the deep end of a life that she has no idea how to live. Inevitably, this sends our protagonist headfirst into some excruciatingly embarrassing (yet equally hilarious) moments. However, despite the humiliation-inducing experiences that she faces, Johanna still remains a very strong character in terms of her (unwavering) confidence.
It's an indelible fact that some of the people she works with do take advantage of Johanna. Perhaps she is a target because she is female in an invariably male-dominated industry, perhaps it's because of her young age or perhaps it's due to her general naivety towards adult life. Likely, these are all factors that contribute towards how she is manipulated by some of her work colleagues. There's also the possibility that her working class roots led others around her to wrongfully see her as an easy target.
Talking of working class roots, there is a massive clash between her old life in Wolverhampton and her new life in London. Her work colleagues don't necessarily realise the divide between these two chapters in her life, especially as a lot of them come from privileged backgrounds. Back home her family is on benefits. There is a section at the start of the novel in particular where she goes to the library and can't afford to borrow a CD for 20p. It contrasts so vividly with her life in London where no one really knows what her normal is, or how she is used to living.
Johanna decides that the best way to fit in with her new surroundings and peers is to maintain the 'Dolly Wilde' façade... so she continues adding things to the story and persona of Dolly Wilde, moulding what is essentially a made-up character to fit what everyone else thinks she should be, and running further and further away from her true self.
It's not that she's ashamed of her background, more just that she was so frustrated by that life that she wants to shed all of it and be this wondrous, awe-inspiring woman that everyone likes and whose name is Dolly. In order to achieve this, she has to test the waters to see what people like and what people don't like. So she says things, and depending on people's reactions, she decides if that's the type of thing Dolly should keep on saying or not. She has to do all this research to decide how she should build this new, improved, more exciting version of herself. It's not until the end of the book that she realises that she doesn't need to reinvent herself. She doesn't need to change how she is to fit in. She can just be Johanna Morrigan- an important reminder to be yourself, even when the temptation is to do the opposite.
This book captures the feeling of teenage frustration- feeling trapped somewhere and wanting to escape but not quite knowing how to- so well. There is a lot of 90's music and pop culture references that I didn't always understand, but overall this didn't hold the story back, because the emotional themes within the book (which explore what it is to discover who you are as a person and who you want to be) were so engaging, that it balanced out the sections that the barrier of age prevented me from understanding.
By Frances Hudson
