She’s back. The irrepressible Dolly Wilde has rebounded into our lives with all her teenage wit, angst and lust. How To Be Famous is the second novel in the planned trilogy by British author and funnywoman Caitlin Moran, a sequel to the 2014 bestselling How To Build a Girl.
Dolly has reinvented herself, from a poor, fat, insecure 14-year-old living with her crazy family in a Midlands council house, to a poor, fat, insecure 18-year-old living in London and writing for a music magazine at the height of the 1990s Britpop movement (mirroring Moran’s own early life).
The smoking, hard-drinking, profane and precocious young woman sexualizes everything and everybody, including her favourite classic authors. “I bet all the Bronte sisters wanked a lot,” she writes, adding that Moby Dick’s “first few pages are basically Melville crushing on the hotness of Queequeg.”
With few friends and not much of a love life outside of one-night stands, she has a mad crush on troubled rock star John Kite, who treats her as a buddy.
Dolly hatches a plan. She decides that if she writes clever columns with secret messages to John, she can win him over.
Meanwhile, she’s had a disturbing sexual encounter with famous comedian Jerry Sharp. But because she’s unsure what good sex looks like — are weird or uncomfortable things an acquired taste, like olives? — she goes back to the abrasive comedian, with surprising consequences.
How To Be Famous mixes hilarity with some serous gender-related themes: women who go back to abusive men, why performers value male fans over female fans, why rock music beats pop. “Things that boys love are cooler than things that girls love,” Dolly realizes, which is both true and tragic.
She ultimately resolves the Jerry Sharp situation in a way that would have been utterly implausible in the slut-shaming 1990s but might elicit cheers in today’s #metoo era. The book’s jagged edges dissolve at the end into a puddle of sweet syrup.
While I applaud Moran for championing healthy female sexuality, I’d be cautious about suggesting this book to young adolescents. Dolly’s libido is so prodigious and her horny-porny adventures ultimately so mindblowingly satisfying that girls with average lives may see this as one more reason to feel inadequate.
But for readers with grown-up sensibilities, How To Be Famous is a rollicking trip into a young woman’s world, equal parts delightful, frightful and insightful. To Moran I say: Well done, you.
Journalist Marcia Kaye is a frequent contributor to these pages.
