Feminist author says her new book answers the question, ‘What about the men?’

LUKE RIX-STANDING

IMUST have something mis-wired in my brain,” says Caitlin Moran, speaking on the phone from her home in North London, “because I can talk about absolutely any aspect of my physical or emotional state, and just find it incredibly funny.” It’s this humour and unflinching honesty that’s made Moran an icon and a role model. Her 2011 bestseller, How To Be A Woman, a delightfully witty expose on being young and female, earned her a place on millions of bookshelves and at the forefront of feminist thought.

She had literally written the book on womanhood, or so it seemed. “How To Be A Woman was from the vantage point of being 32, looking back over the years when you work out who you are,” she recalls. “By your early-30s, you think, ‘Well, I’ve done all the hard work, from now on it’ll be lunches with friends and wearing linen trousers’.”

Now 45 – with two teenage daughters, countless newspaper columns, and a much longer marriage – Moran is back for the sequel. A cross between memoir and self-help, More Than A Woman races through the good, bad and ugly of middle-age – from the marital ‘maintenance shag’ to the horrors of mid-life hangovers.

“We don’t sell the idea of being middle-aged to young women, and there’s such fear in young people about getting older,” she says. “I’m very purposefully trying to sell it, because A – it’s brilliant, and B – the only other option is dying, which is palpably worse.”

She manages to harangue the rubbishness of daily life, while also celebrating every minute of it, proving that feminism – and most other things – can be fun and defiant at the same time. Middle-age is both “brilliant” and “a bag of balls”.

Moran speaks as she writes – a mile a minute, with plenty of italics – and it’s easy to imagine she neither needs nor wants much editing. “I’m very first draft-y,” she says, “and I find it awkward talking to other writers because they seem to find writing quite agonising. I see it as a stand-up monologue – I very much imagine I’m talking to people.”

Some chapters pick up where How To Be A Woman left off, and Moran is as irked as ever at the linguistic limits on female genitalia. Men can choose from a vast buffet of phallic vocabulary, while women are left with a few squirm-inducing terms, most of which, she points out, aren’t even anatomically accurate.

Topics like sex, language and society are home turf for Moran, but this book breaks new ground with a powerful, heart-wrenching chapter on her daughter’s eating disorder, which balances tenderness with a determination not to pull a single punch.

“My daughter wanted me to write about it,” Moran says, “and I’m so proud of her. I wanted to describe all the things my husband and I did wrong – two incredibly loving, wellmeaning people – because nobody talks about it.

“You can’t ‘parent’ someone who’s mentally ill, you have to become a health professional, and parents just aren’t given the advice.”

Family and friends feature heavily in Moran’s work, but the apparent abandon with which she portrays them masks genuine concern for their privacy.

“There’s a little trick I do. I use a tiny sketch of something that happened, and then use that as a platform to discuss bigger issues. It gives the impression of full disclosure, but the amount I’ve written about my family’s lives is actually small.”

Her daughters sign off relevant sections but do not read her books, because, however tiny the sketch, “no one wants to read about their mum having sex with their dad”.

At live events, there’s one question Moran constantly encounters: what about the men?

Following a conversation with her brother, Moran took to Twitter, and asked the men of social media to tell her the downsides of being male.

The result was a deluge ranging from mental health to assumed ‘stranger danger’, so she sat down and thought: yes, what about the men?