How to Build a Girl: A Novel

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. - - 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.

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 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 six hundred 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?