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 Brontes 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."
