Caitlin Moran, welcome to Waterstones. Thank you very much it's a pleasure to be here.
It's such a pleasure to have you here. We're here to talk about How To Be Famous
Let's just get that merch there, look at that! Oh, who left this here?
I wonder what you might want to buy this month? Oh my god, it's this!
Which is the sequel to How To Build A Girl
At the end of How To Build a Girl we left Johanna/Dolly
on her way, going to London
Metaphorically, like at the end of The Italian Job
where they're in a bus hanging over a cliff and it's like
what's she gonna do now? So we pick up six months later and so she's
living in London now, she's 18, she's moved down with her dog. She's basically
Pippi Longstocking sort of living living alone with animals but with lots more
whisky and sex than Pippi Longstocking had as far as I
remember from those books. And it's the height of Britpop and you know I mean
I'm sure many people might have guessed that these books about a
fat working-class girl who becomes a teenager journalist and has a lot of sex
are roughly based on experiences that I may have had in my life and this is
what happened to me in the beginning of '94/'95. It was the Britpop explosion
and so all these people that I knew who'd been in bands and we'd just been
down the pub together and they were just kind of indie bands with kind of like
you know a medium following and stuff.
Suddenly Brit Pop happened and they were all on Top of the Pops and as
happened with Brit Pop this sudden onslaught of fame for these people
drives them all crazy in different ways. People generally respond quite badly to
suddenly being really famous and they all respond in different ways and Dolly
sees herself as the kind of Fame Doctor. She's like I'm gonna be wise, I'm gonna
help them through this, I'm gonna write a monthly column about the perils and
pitfalls of Fame and helpfully help all these troubled, famous people use their
fame in a creative way
And it is a tremendously funny book and it's
also very moving and I loved the fact that it's about how women create
themselves. I think it's probably my favorite thing about it. How
important is that to you as an idea, how women create ideas of
themselves and also how those ideas can be taken over by other people.
This is my recurrent theme in nearly everything I write. It's like, how are we what we are?
I'm obsessed with this idea of 'what is normal?'
and our definition of normal is very, very narrow and our ideas of what
we can have as women are still very narrow despite the amazing things
that have happened in feminism and art over the last hundred years. So that's my
recurrent theme and in this we're seeing Dolly dealing with different levels of
fame. Her friends become famous and then she realizes there's another kind of
Fame which is infamy, 'cause something very bad happens to her, she has sex
with a very bad man who makes a sex tape of her and uses it to shame her.
So it's like what do you do as a woman if you experience sexual shame and this
is something so many women experience like, you now, we have revenge porn which
is so common for teenagers and women in their early 20s. So I wanted, you know, I
had long thought what would I do if I was in that situation, if I was a teenage
girl and someone had tried to shame me sexually and the conclusion that she
comes to she sort of comes into her emotions, she finally realizes she is
angry about this and she's going to do something about it. As I was writing that
book the whole Harvey Weinstein/MeToo thing was exploding on the internet so I was
sitting there writing, going 'I am writing the book of what is happening now
globally' and the conclusion that these women have come to, how you deal with
shame that's been put upon you is exactly what she's doing in this book.
I'm on to something here! This is great ! I'm tracking a global movement, hooray!
And there's this wonderful point when she's talking about What Katy Did and not
having a kind of What Katy Did heroine who kind of suffers stoically
Just eat them - that Marge Simpson thing, take all your emotions and push them down into a ball in the
bottom of your stomach. And traditionally like in all the books that
you know I read so that's generally what you have to do, you have to stoically suffer
We need to stop these things happening and you don't stop these
things happening by being silent and suffering and being noble. You stop these
things happening by talking about it, sharing your experiences, realizing that
they're incredibly common and then sharing these experiences banding
together again, well this has to change. This stuff stops happening now.
There will not be another generation that will feel they have to be noble.
They can be angry, they can change things instead.
There's a line in it when you talk about, where Dolly talks about wanting women to look
at their sex lives and smile. To think of their sex lives and smile. And it's just
such a brilliant moment and I thought that's what I would have loved
to hear when I was a young woman, it's good to hear now, what would you like
your readers, perhaps particularly your younger readers, to kind of take from reading this?
Well I mean a huge element of it was about the sex because sort of like
when you read the statistics now about how young people learn
about sex now, it's in the high 90 percents that most people's first,
the first sex that they see and the first sex education they get is watching
pornography. And what you need to have when you're watching pornography is a
caption underneath that reminds you this isn't sex, this is some people at work.
This is their office, their orifice, like these people, this isn't sex, this
isn't the kind of sex you're gonna have and neither should you want to. And you know
even growing up sort of like in the 80s and 90s like kind of generally the tone
of sex in in books and in TV that I watched was that sex, particularly for a
young woman was something they should kind of endure, almost like a war that
you should get through and become battle hardened and be able to
cope with it. And particularly now I've got teenage daughters myself this
horrifies me, the idea that something that should be so joyful and
brilliant and fun - I mean it's free, it doesn't make you put on weight,
cats are managing to do this on rooves! How have we as humans managed
to screw up sex and make it so awful and so fraught and so traumatic?
Sex should be, as a young woman, something that you think about with a joyful smile
you know when you're looking back at your memories or thinking about what
you're going to do now. So it was very important to me that I wrote lots of
different kinds of sex in the book, she has bad sex with this bad man, but she
also takes the virginity of a male friend. I thought I've never read about that..
Which is just a fantastic, it's really joyful.
Thank you. But we always read about men taking women's virginity and I was like well
you know the first time that you have sex as a woman, actually that's
one of the worst shags that you have. That's the one with the bleeding and the
pain and also the fear you're gonna get pregnant even though you've made him put
on five condoms and not come inside you and go into a bathroom and do it whilst he's
in a sleeping bag but you're still like oh god I'm gonna get pregnant. Whereas the
first time a man has sex, generally that's gonna work out quite
well and who are you gonna be as a woman doing this thing and you know
showing him this joyful thing. And then you know there's a
big sex scene in it where I just wanted to write about the most
joyful shag you could possibly have because
particularly the sex that you read or watch as a young person it's not just
where you learn about sex; that wires your brain.
These become like your primary stimuli sort of like what you see. You think that
is sex, you're wired to it, it becomes into your subconscious. And still you
know like in a world of Fifty Shades of Grey and pornography, all the sex that
I'm reading about that women are having or that I'm seeing is again them
enduring it and getting through it in order to prove
a point or prove themselves worthy. And I wanted to write about some sex that she
wanted to have, that was brilliant, that was communicative, that was fun, that was
silly, that was funny, that was really horny. You know my greatest hope is that
just at least one teenage girl reads this and then masturbates afterwards thinking about it.
If that happens, my job is done.
I think that's fairly assured, probably.
It should have a post-it on it, 'Guaranteed wank friendly.'
We can do those, surely?!
You will get your rocks off if you read this book. It's a fruity book.
No one gets whipped or beaten, it's just great sex.
And I think as well with friendship in this book I think it's so
important, the way you write about friendship I think feels incredibly
genuine to me. And particularly about women's friendship. Again where I feel
there's just, there's a lot of representations of - you would think,
reading about women's friendships, that women are permanently wanting to throw
each other under the bus. And it seems quite important to you to say
actually that's, we're not all doing that all the time.
One of the things I had not read
about was a relationship between a younger woman and like a feminist mentor
Who's got her own problems and is flawed in her own way and
completely berserk in some ways but like she's an older woman, she's been through
this before, she sees Dolly and she's like I'm gonna teach you. I'm gonna teach
you how to be angry, I'm gonna teach you joy, I'm gonna make you jump in ponds and
swim, I'm gonna teach you to drink these wines, I'm gonna teach you to be angry,
I'm gonna teach you tools of feminism that will help you
analyze this situation and come into your own power. And at the end of it,
rather than you know her feminist mentor like saving her or speaking for her she
goes 'Have my platform.' She literally gives her the stage and says you go now
baby, you can do this. You tell your story. And I was just like
it thrilled me to write about that friendship 'cause I don't see those
representations of female friendship anywhere.
Is there going to be more? Is there gonna be more Dolly?
Yes! When I came up with this, so I conceived
it as a trilogy and my friend, the novelist John Niven, who wrote Kill Your Friends,
when I told him, I'm going to write a trilogy, just barked with laughter
for about five minutes and went, 'You insane baggage, no one ever says I'm
going to write a trilogy, that's just not what you do.' I was like but it has to be
a trilogy. So the idea is that you meet her first when she's 14 and she has
nothing and then we see her in this book and she sort of moves to London start
seeing how fame and power works. And then the last one is How To Change
The World which will be set in the present day. And the idea is that we're
going to follow Dolly all the way through her life to the point where she goes
into politics and tries to change the world. Because what I see in politics
at the moment is a return to this idea of a ruling class. It's always the same
kind of men from the same kind of schools, who've done the same kind of
degrees and they all went to the same clubs and they've all got the same ideas
and they are the ones that are our ruling class at the moment. And we had a
brilliant blip in the post-war years where it was working-class people who
were coming up with solutions for working-class people's problems. And I
think so many people that I know now, they're more politically
engaged than they've ever been before but they think their future is in activism.
They don't think I will go into politics but politics is where you make
legislation, is where you make change. Working-class people should be looking
at the situation of the moment, going I want to be in power I want to be in the
room where I make the votes, I want to draft legislation. And so I wanted to
write a story about a girl that any girl could read, a girl that comes from a
background like mine and read it and see her go from nothing to this and go, well,
I could do that. This is the job for me. I should be in those
rooms, I should have that power, this is what I am born to.
Well thank you, it's a delight from cover to cover and I think anyone would want to be in Dolly's
company cheering her along. Yeah, more Dollys in the world!
There will be many more Dollys, thank you very much!