Caitlin Moran - interview

During the obscenely glittering course of her journalistic career, the Times writer Caitlin Moran has snorted talcum powder with the late Kirsty MacColl, watched Lady Gaga pee out Scotch (diluted, obviously) through her fishnets and drunk enough Champagne to kill a small horse with Jilly Cooper. So I am understandably excited about what substance she might choose to fuel our conversation. Since it’s a Friday afternoon, I speculate that it will probably be alcohol – and accordingly go out and eat the kind of lunch (two mini pork pies if you must know) that will line my stomach for a boozathon. So I’m faintly disappointed when the only stimulant on offer when we reach her house is tea.

Luckily it turns out that either tea contains the formula that lights up all of Moran’s neural networks, or she is just fascinating, independent of any sharpener. Singer-songwriter Martin Carr (formerly of The Boo Radleys) once described her as a ‘force of mouthture’, and this goes some way to conveying the fast-paced mountain-goat leaping from topic to topic that constitutes a conversation with her. She has a pretty, animated face – her eyebrows have a punctuation all of their own, and although I’m fairly sure there was no point at which they turned into exclamation marks, I couldn’t swear to it. Like the bushy swoop of dark hair, with its trademark streak of white, they seem directly connected to the radioactive fizz of her thoughts.

These days she is very middle-class north London media – "I even have a boiling tap," she says proudly, as she stands in her large lightfilled kitchen with pots and pans hanging above her, forming a culinary milky way. A long way, in every sense, from her upbringing in a small council house in Wolverhampton, where, as she says in her book "my mother is like some Ford car production line, producing a small, gobby, hippy baby every two years [eight in total]… until our house is full to bursting point".

Although she went to school until she was 11, in their teens all the children were home-schooled. "We didn’t have lessons – it was just going to the library every day, just learning stuff." A gloriously eccentric upbringing by any standards, allowing them an imaginative existence that has turned them into a sort of Wolverhampton working-class version of the Mitfords (without, of course, the sprinklings of fascism): she tells me that one sister has just finished her first novel, another is co-writing a sitcom with Moran, while a brother has just taken Cambridge Footlights on its first American tour.

Yet although Moran is relentlessly comic about her childhood, it’s also easy to read between the lines how difficult it was. Living on cheap food, the entire family was overweight – Moran was 13 stone at 13, 16 stone at 16. At one point I ask her about the drugs she has taken, and she replies, revealingly, "I haven’t done drugs for 15 years but ecstasy really did change my life. It just seemed to burn a whole load of self loathing out. It seemed to burn all the Wolverhampton off me. I just suddenly forgot the smell of breweries and canals with dead fish in them."

Luckily for her parents (her dad was a session musician, her mother was, clearly, busy having babies), Moran’s brain was finding better nourishment than her stomach. Aged 12, she won the Dillons Essay Competition, at 15 she scooped up The Observer’s Young Reporter Award, and in the same year had her first (largely autobiographical) novel published, The Chronicles of Narmo, at 16 she was writing for Melody Maker. I still remember Valerie Grove interviewing her in The Times, as amazed by her precocious writing talent as if Moran had been reared by wolves rather than in Wolverhampton. When she was 18 she started writing for the paper – "One week The Observer couldn’t run my column, so I faxed it to The Times, and they gave me a column that day" – that same year she started hosting Naked City, a late-night music programme on Channel 4. Naked City didn’t survive, but her career on The Times has – and she was recently given the double accolade of 2011 Press Awards’ Critic of the Year and Interviewer of the Year (the latter for her endearingly chaotic, boozy, gossipgoldmine of an interview with Lady Gaga).

Now we have the book. A full 20 years after the first one (though given the journalism career, the husband –rock critic Peter Paphides – and the two children, it’s not as if she hasn’t had anything else to keep her occupied), this is Moran’s determined attempt to wrestle feminism away from the more academic is-this-or-is-this-not-a-phallocentric-sentence arena, and fling it down into a place where the Grazia-reading sisterhood can get at it. Her highly autobiographical How to Be a Woman is funny and exuberant, OFTEN BREAKING OUT INTO CAPITAL LETTERS FOR EMPHASIS, and delivers opinions on everything from whether or not you should get a Brazilian to what it means to have an abortion. It’s unlikely to have Simone de Beauvoir twitching with jealousy in her grave, but it’s not meant to – the point is to get people talking without either rhetorically ripping off testicles or terrifying the uninitiated with long-winded terminology.

The key to Moran’s argument is the ‘Broken Windows’ philosophy. "In the “Broken Windows” theory," she writes, "if a single, broken window on an empty building is ignored, and not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may break into the building, and light fires." That’s the reason, she declares, that although they are "pressing, disgusting and wrong", she is not focusing on issues like female circumcision and domestic abuse. Instead she is asking such questions as why women need to wax off their pubic hair, or why newspapers and magazines can get away with pillorying women for weight or fashion choices: silly yet insidious aspects of misogyny, which subtly straitjacket a generation of women who are under the illusion that they don’t need feminism any more.

On the afternoon I go to interview her, the Twittersphere – of which Moran is a dedicated member – is hyperventilating over an imminent Germaine Greer review in The Times. "I’m still too scared to read it," Moran has already tweeted. Yet Greer’s review, though scathing about Moran’s depiction of Greer herself – "This straw woman tells women to taste their own menstrual blood (I didn’t)" – proves largely positive, concluding: "She is still, as she was in 1994, a genuinely original talent."

Are you disappointed that Germaine Greer didn’t disagree with you? Isn’t that almost a necessary rite of passage for someone who’s a feminist these days?
I love her to bits. You know, I and every other girl in the world owes her a debt for something. I re-read The Female Eunuch before I started writing and just so much of it hasn’t dated. It’s like an act of rock ’n’ roll, it’s not an act of academia.

You say the conversation about feminism had stopped. Why do you think that is?
I absolutely, 100 per cent, wholeheartedly blame the Spice Girls. Pretty much entirely Geri Halliwell but obviously the others played their role. Because they took the phrase 'girl power' and just said, 'Well that’s feminism now, we don’t need to have big words.' The thing is if 'girl power' had had any idea behind it, it would have been fine. But all it meant was being good friends with your girl friends, and, to paraphrase Chris Rock, what else are you supposed to do you low expectation-motherfucker? You’re supposed to be friends with your girl friends, you know. Is that it?

Misogyny redefines itself all the time. In the book you say it’s a bit like Meryl Streep in a new film: sometimes you don’t recognise it straight away. How do you deal with that?
I think that instead of feminism being a political thing, it should be an act of creativity. It’s more of a rock ’n’ roll thing. It’s not really about us arguing against sexism, it’s more us going, 'Oh fuck this, we’re going to go and do something else – make films, write things, have conversations, form clubs, and be friends in a way that you cannot understand.'

Did the act of writing this book make you change your mind about anything?
I don’t think I put down everything that I feel about fashion. I love clothes, but I think I sounded a bit sour, because it’s such a massive industry and it’s still often so abusive to both the people that make the clothes and to the women who wear them. Most women I know love the idea of fashion, but the practicalities that go with it are just distressing. All that bullshit about 'Ooh, she’s gone from a size eight to a size ten.' If we all went to old-fashioned dress-makers none of us would know what size we were anyway.

How do you think people are going to react to the abortion chapter? [Moran chose to have an abortion when she realised she was pregnant with what would have been her third child.]
I’m really content with it. I really wanted to write it because I’ve just not seen an accessible account of everything you think when you’re having an abortion, and it’s such a common thing. We are still fucked as a sex if there are things that happen to us incredibly commonly that we have to deal with secretly. I’ve seen a lot of mothers who have one child and say, 'Oh, I’d love four. Then you have two and you think: 'Two is enough, really.’

There is something that puzzles me about Moran when I come to write up our interview, and at first I think it revolves around a contradiction in her personality. The feminism as rock ’n’ roll, the proud brandishing of her decision not to become a mother again, the wildchild interviews which have made her name all seem to sit slightly oddly with the happily domesticated woman with an idyllic garden (on which, she tells me, she spends most of her money). Then suddenly I realise there’s no contradiction at all. This is someone for whom joyful exuberance has always been a survival mechanism. It defined the writing that allowed her to escape from the overcrowded council house, it defines the way she lives now: the kitchen is clearly primed for instant dinner parties, and, she tells me, she constantly has siblings moving in with her, which implies she’s been mothering far more than two children for a while. And it defines her feminism. "There’s no need to throw ourselves under a horse, or even a donkey," she writes. "We just need to look it ['patriarchal bullshit'] squarely in the eye… and laugh."

No wonder she picks someone like Gaga as her ideal kind of feminist. No wonder the other women she has most enjoyed interviewing – Jilly Cooper, Courtney Love – though very different, similarly use humour and exuberance as their survival mechanisms. "Interviews with Courtney Love are always amazing," Moran laughs. "She’ll just turn the tape recorder off and tell you like an hour of gossip that’ll just have your eyes popping. She took me to Carrie Fisher’s sixtieth birthday party… and Carrie Fisher’s standing at the top of the stairs, with the Star Wars music blaring out, wearing a woolly hat that has knitted layer buns on it, just going, 'Come and meet my friend George Lucas,' and you’re just going, 'Oh my fucking Christ.' Debbie Reynolds is sitting there covered in diamonds. Every inch of her covered in diamonds like a Fabergé egg!"

Very different to our own interview, which has now come to an end. I think of the pork pies I have eaten, and of the bottles of Champagne we haven’t consumed together, but I’ve had a good time, and it’s difficult to be upset about it. As the photoshoot is about to start, Moran goes to the other end of her kitchen, and returns carrying a large jar. "Biscuit?" she asks, taking off the lid. "That would be very nice," I smile, and help myself to a ginger nut.

How To Be A Woman is out now through Random House, RRP $29.95

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