Now a major motion picture starring Beanie Feldstein!
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 Bröntes--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.
