Who cares if the hero’s too good to be true? The bestselling poptimist has rewritten her past in heroic terms, creating a rollicking fantasy which leaves a rosy afterglow
These days the concept of Britain as a creative meritocracy is retreating as alarmingly fast as the polar ice caps, as libraries shut, youth centres are defunded, record companies retrench and London is made uninhabitable for the young by dodgy money from the Wild East. In the 1990s, it was a different story. There was still plenty to get upset about – the aftermath of the Gulf war, for starters – but some things were occasionally all right. A relative nobody, even a female person, could rock up and live somewhere cheap in Zone 2 and – with the generous application of chutzpah, some bat-wing eyeliner and a well-lubricated social life – careen their way into a journalistic career.
This past London was not so much a foreign country as “a game” you could play – or so reckons Caitlin Moran’s alter ego, Johanna Morrigan, in How to Be Famous, the sequel to Moran’s autobiographically inspired first novel, How to Build a Girl. That book laid out Mor(rig)an’s idiosyncratic childhood and love of masturbation, and Moran’s default candour continues here, too. A lodestar quote from US poet and activist Audre Lorde swapped between characters in How to Be Famous illuminates Moran’s approach to sex, among other matters: “Your silence will not protect you.”
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2KrgCwI
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