• 2015.Discover Caitlin

«My first relationship was with a famous humorist of the moment, and it happened from the beginning to the end in my imagination. I never met him, nor talked to him, nor did we agree in the same room; and yet, on the train from Wolverhampton to London Euston I had one of the most intense relationships of my life: all illusory, ”we read a few years ago in How to be a woman, a novel with which Caitlin Moran surprised more than one with his carelessness, with his scathing and provocative speech, with his feminist fighter, oblivious to all academicism, and with his strong class claim. Now that famous humorist is real, his name is Jerry Sharp , but he is far from being the passionate and ingenious lover that the protagonist expects: Johanna Morrigan, alter ego of her author, a young 19-year-old musical journalist who signs her chronicles with the Dolly Wilde's name.

In How to be famous, second novel of a future trilogy that should conclude with How to change the world , we moved to London, in 1994, a city in which still a young woman without a hard could survive writing in magazines that, even paying badly, welcomed newcomers like Johanna, who has just moved to London from her native Wolverhampton and begins to make her way into the masculine world of the music press. It's the 90s, the Britpop years, and "Great Britain is in full collective and homoerotic infatuation of Oasis," a group made up of "hard, cool boys from school who, despite hitting you, like you, because they're equally handsome when they are kicking you ». That of the Gallagher brothers is not the only group of "bluffs" that arouse passions between groupies that "have turned everyday life into a jubilee."

Promotional condoms, concerts in the Astoria, many times free cocaine, unlimited alcohol and sex, not as satisfactory as one would expect, are the elements of this jubilee in which musical idols participate, whose careers are constantly threatened by a difficult fame of assume and by the pressures of a market and an audience that continuously claims success.

Through his alter ego , Moran reviews those years of debauchery, but at the same time deeply conservative: the groups that succeed are male and journalists like Johanna are considered as simple fans . How to be famous is much more than a scathing and demystifying description of an era and a musical context, it is a novel about the learning process of a young woman who abandons innocence to become an adult. Johanna is becoming aware of what it means to be a woman in a world that treats her as an object, of the freedoms that are denied and how necessary it is to claim herself as a subject. Moran questions without contemplation the aesthetic clichés through which the woman is dispossessed of her own body, observes how the woman's sexual desire is denied - «Let a woman ask to be fucked is funny. Horrible and funny »- and is delegitimated professionally and intellectually and reflects on consent in a context of force and abuse:« I don't say "Fuck me harder" because I'm having a good time, but because I want this to end as soon as possible. And saying 'Fuck me stronger' is the only way I can think of ending it, ”says Johanna, after her Jerry Sharp makes the video of that forced sexual encounter public.

We can highlight once again the ingenious, incorrect, unleavened, apparently dirty and punk style of Moran, but all these adjectives that describe a writing that runs the risk of becoming a somewhat repetitive formula, should not make us lose sight of how to be famous is a harsh criticism of the cultural story of the nineties, but above all it is a novel that raises what Simone de Beauvoir said: «You are not born a woman, you become one».

Questioning many of the topics around feminism, How to be famous claims feminism as a transformative discourse not only of society, but of every individual. Johanna becomes a woman when she assumes that, as Audre Lorde would say, silence will not protect her .

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