Caitlin Moran
How to Build A Girl Book Tour,
Hackney Empire London
★★★★★ (out of 5)
“I DO not have a tiny vagina”, shouts Caitlin Moran.
She has already covered the two Ms, masturbation and menstruation in great depth. Moran is launching into the second half of her show at the sold out Hackney Empire, with the same enthusiasm for all things vulva.
Raised on a council estate in Wolverhampton, by her hippie mother, and Irish father, Moran published her first book at age 16. She is now one the world’s best-known columnists, and the author of the bestselling ‘How to be a woman’.
She is on tour reading from her latest book How to Build a Girl, currently sitting at number two in the bestsellers list. A fact she announces with glee. The first few pages read like a surreal 90s Angela’s Ashes, drunk, feckless father, long-suffering mother, siblings too numerous to name.
The Empire is a grand old dame of a theatre, and from the dress circle Moran looks tiny. In her trademark outfit, checked shirt, denim shorts, Dr. Martens and big hair, she is dwarfed by the stage.
Accompanied by just a small table, on it notes, a copy of her book, and of course, both a cup of tea and a gin cocktail, it is only her energy that fills the void.
It’s been an unseasonably warm day in London and Moran is keen confront the plague of articles advising us to ‘get our legs out’. That annual horror, familiar to any woman with the milk-bottle white legs of Celtic extraction. She is kick-starting a body image revolution, from the comfort and security of a pair of tights.
Readings from How to Build a Girl are interspersed with stories about her monthly ghastliness, that’s her period, and readings from her various columns. Most memorably her advice to her daughter, “Nine times out of ten, you’re not having a nervous breakdown, you just need a cup of tea and a biscuit.”
This crucial bit of wisdom is immortalised on a tea towel, available to buy, with all profit going to women’s charity Refuge.
The show draws to a close and she announces she will not being staying for the advertised book signing, although she has ensured they are pre-signed. She is unwell and has performed tonight with a fever.
If this is Moran on an off day, what kind of force of nature is this woman on top of her game? The book sales will probably answer that.
