How To Be A Woman
Author: Caitlin Moran
Genre: Memoir/Essay
Grade: B
At the beginning of the year I joined two book clubs on Goodreads: Persutopia and Our Shared Shelf and I have now read officially two books assigned by them! Yeah, me!
One of the reasons I decided to read this one was because I had heard of Moran but didn’t even know enough about her to know she was a columnist or considered a feminist writer. To be honest I also decided to read it when I saw so many messages in the group saying that they didn’t agree with her so they didn’t even think we should be reading it.
This book really is more of a memoir than anything else though she does take some stands on things like porn, marriage, shoes and celebrity. On the memoir part I actually found her pretty relatable. (It’s always nice to know that I’m not the only one in the world who dreams up elaborate life roads with my favorite celebrity. Seriously, if I ever meet Michael Fassbender in real life I’d probably run away. In my head, well, that’s a whole other story.)
And a lot of stuff I disagreed with her on. That angle of this book is of course personal and everyone is different. I found her funny in some parts and in others could totally see why people would find her humor off-putting and even flinched at some of her word choices. Plus she does tend to make a lot of sweeping generalizations which for me at made some of her arguments a lot harder to buy into.
There’s also a story in here about her mother’s pregnancies and one particular birth. I swear it’s like a sentence or two in the book and had me cringing worse than than a horror movie. Ugh, it still makes me cringe a week and a half later!
Recommend: Yes/No. Again these things are so personal. Her writings can be pretty easily researched. If it sounds like something that interests you it’s worth a read. But again, I definitely came at this as more of a memoir than anything else so that may have helped in my reading experience.