How to Build a Girl

The New York Times bestselling author hailed as the UKs 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.What do you do in your teenage years when you realize what your parents taught you wasnt enough? You must go out and find books and poetry and pop songs and bad heroesand build yourself.Its 1990. Johanna Morrigan, fourteen, has shamed herself so badly on local TV that she decides that theres no point in being Johanna anymore and reinvents herself as Dolly Wildefast-talking, hard-drinking Gothic hero and full-time Lady Sex Adventurer. She will save her poverty-stricken Bohemian family by becoming a writerlike Jo in Little Women, or the Brntesbut without the dying young bit.By sixteen, shes smoking cigarettes, getting drunk and working for a music paper. Shes writing pornographic letters to rock-stars, having all the kinds of sex with all kinds of men, and eviscerating bands in reviews of 600 words or less.But what happens when Johanna realizes shes 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?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.