Review. Caitlin Moran - How to be a Woman.

Winner of the 2011 Galaxy Book Awards Book of the Year

Image of Moran taken from Google.

This is the first How to.. book I have ever read.

Perhaps a little strange that I am reading a book on how to be a woman, when I am in my early twenties with a diamond weighing down my left hand. In most ways I am already a woman. 

Even so, it was actually the author that made me want to read this book, not my apparent incapability of being something that every girl naturally grows in to.

Now that I have finished reading it, I realise that I have misunderstood the title entirely, it is called "How to be a Woman" not "How to become a Woman."

To me, it has acted like a little paper friend, reassuring me that all of my feelings, all of my bodily functions and a lot of my thoughts about feminism are completely normal and they are shared by every woman not just myself. It is 16 chapters of ultimate, unifying, femininity.

Caitlin Moran entered my life in 2013 when I was encountering personal issues and a lecturer of mine recommended I read "How to be a Woman" I had never heard of this Caitlin (you say it Catlin) Moran, and I thought my lecturer was telling me to politely, "Man up and get over it."
But, in fact, almost two years later when I finally bought a copy and read it cover to cover, I see that all my lecturer was trying to show me, is that I am amazing, I am absolutely amazing and one of the reasons I am amazing, is because I am part of the female population of this world. That was when I realised, I am a feminist.

Being a feminist does not mean I hate men, it means I love being a woman.

Beginning in Wolverhampton 1988 on her 13th birthday, Moran guides you through the adolescent female right through to the mid-thirties female and tells you every gory detail of her life in between.

Moran has written How to be a Woman as an insight into her life and what growing into a woman was like for her. In some areas, reading this book was just like reading parts of my own life back to myself and as scary as it was at first, I now find it comforting to know that I wasn't on my own during that time. Women fight a lot of silent battles on our own, battles that we think are personal when in actuality if we spoke openly about them we would fine a whole army of hormonal, feisty, bitches that are feeling the same way as each other and I feel this would lead to nothing but good things for us.

How to be a Woman is witty, hilarious, repulsive, upsetting, and comforting all at once. It has made me laugh more than anything, but some chapters did break me and I shed a little tear in bed in the early hours before uttering to a sleepy, pissed-off SK, "just one more page and I'll turn the light off... please get me a tissue" 

It has everything that the average woman will encounter, whether it is in their own life or the lives of other woman around them, all manner of periods, sex, breast envy, public sexism, love, vaginas, sex, friends, sex, body image, marriage, childbirth, miscarriage, abortion, work, work related sexism and a whole KFC bucket load of other topics all crammed into 320 pages of pure, loyal, explicit, feminism.

I give this 5/5 stars. Every woman should read this book.