Happy Birthday, Caitlin Moran! Today we are celebrating this fabulous author, journalist and screenwriter.
Caitlin is a columnist at British newspaper The London Times, where she writes three columns, including a satirical one called “Celebrity Watch,” in which she analyzes pop culture sarcastically. The column includes topics such as Cher’s savior complex and why calling it a “zombie government” is offensive to zombies. She is also the author of How to Build a Girl, which was also adapted into a film starring Beanie Feldstein. Caitlin is known for her witty writing and for being politically outspoken in everything she writes, especially on the topic of feminism.
Caitlin was born in Brighton, England in 1972. Caitlin was creative from a young age, having been homeschooled along with her seven siblings, and having a father who was a punk rock drummer. At just sixteen, she began her career as a journalist, writing for a music publication called Melody Maker. She wrote her first novel at sixteen as well, called The Chronicles of Narmo, a witty, fictional recreation of her experiences being homeschooled with her siblings.
Caitlin spent the next few decades hosting a music TV show, Naked City, and writing a comedy/drama TV series with her sister called Raised By Wolves about their upbringing in Wolverhampten (England).
Caitlin’s semi-autobiographical novel How to Build a Girl chronicles the coming-of-age of a young girl from a working-class family.
In 2014, Caitlin came out with her semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel How to Build a Girl. The book chronicles the journey of a young girl, Johanna Morigan, from her childhood in a working-class family to becoming Dolly Wilde, a music journalist.
Caitlin then co-write the screenplay and produced the film adaptation of the novel, which came out in 2019. In an interview with FF2 contributor Pamela Powell, Caitlin says of the semi-autobiographical nature of the film, “85 percent of it is literally the stuff that happened to me. … The weirder it looks, the more likely it is to have happened. That’s the guide. I had an unusual life.”
Not only was Caitlin creative from the start, but she has also been a feminist since she was a young girl. In her interview with Pamela Powell, Caitlin credits this in part to having read the Brontë sisters, but not any of their male counterparts in classic literature. She says: “The way they describe women, if I had read that, if I had seen women through the male gaze when I was 13 or 15, I think it would have absolutely damaged me.”
Dabbling in music, film, fiction, nonfiction, and journalism from a very early age, Caitlin Moran is unwavering in her creativity, humor, and feminism. Though she’s led a very unusual life, she hopes to inspire other young creatives with her story. In her interview with Pamela Powell, she says of her film How to Build a Girl that she wants ““…every teenager to watch that movie and [think], that could be me!”
© Julia Lasker (1/9/2023) FF2 Media
LEARN MORE/DO MORE
Read Pamela Powell’s interview with Caitlin Moran for FF2 here.
Visit Caitlin’s Author Page on Amazon.
Scan Caitlin’s filmography on IMDb.
CREDITS & PERMISSIONS
Featured photo: “Twittersquee” by chrisdonia is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Bottom photo: “Moranthology” by Dunk is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
