MORE THAN A WOMAN
CAITLIN MORAN Ebury, 288pp, £20
In 2011 Times columnist Caitlin Moran published her massively successful part-manifesto, partmemoir book, How To Be A Woman. It seemed to reach the parts other feminists couldn’t reach. In More
Than A Woman she discovers that in middle age you no longer have the privilege of being absorbed in your own problems; it is everyone else’s that matter now. Christina Patterson writing in the
Times warned that the reader is in for a shock. There is a chapter on married sex, on ageing, housework and caring for parents as well as the pain of dealing with Moran’s daughter’s agonising eating disorder. It is about ‘how to keep the whole exhausting show on the road without going mad’ and is ‘packed with insights that feel like revelations’. Moran is ‘touchingly honest about her own failures, and touchingly generous in her entire approach to life’.
Moran is ‘great at the observational stuff’, said Fiona Sturges in the Guardian. She found her ‘very funny’ while her feminism is full of commonsense. Holly Williams in the Observer enjoyed the ‘comically exasperated look at the faffy demands of fortysomething life: the never-ending to-do list, the furious multitasking’. While for Lorraine Berry, writing in the Los
Angeles Times, this book ‘celebrates the hard-won wisdom of middle age’. Moran discovers that out of the stress and anxiety of middle age, emerges a fearlessness combined with kindness: ‘You become tougher. You are gentler. You automatically presume everyone has a secret sorrow. Because they almost always do.’