If you have ever been a young woman attempting to break into writing of any kind, it’s likely you will see yourself in Johanna Morrigan (pen name: Dolly Wilde), the heroine of Caitlin Moran’s new novel, “How to Be Famous.” Dolly, picking up where she left off in Moran’s “How to Build a Girl,” is making her living in London, away from her working-class family, and facing the odds, which aren’t with her — she’s young, female, unconnected and broke — with the kind of borderline-pathological self-confidence required to break into any industry that basically doesn’t want you.
Dolly works in music journalism, and her account of life in that sort of no-rules clubhouse of men delivered a shock of recognition I did not expect from a novel by Caitlin Moran, who, previous to “How to Build a Girl,” was perhaps best known in stateside intersectional feminist circles for saying, ahead of an interview with HBO’s “Girls” creator Lena Dunham, that she “could not give a (expletive)” about interrogating the lack of diversity on the show.
But the Moran who wrote this book does seem to care: “How to Be Famous” includes characters who aren’t straight white girls without tokenizing, and also forces a reckoning with the deep-seated sexism of the world of media, and, in particular, music writing. I know it well. Having been a 23-year-old aspiring journalist working in the alternative press, Dolly’s plight hit home for me. “I don’t know if I should work here anymore. I feel… lonely,” she says, of working for a publication where she’s often the only woman in the room. “I feel like all those pictures of the heads of state in the world, where it’s eighty-nine men in suits, and then the Queen, being a woman, on her own. I feel like the Queen, but without her backup of castles.”
My comparison was always to that shot from “The Silence of the Lambs,” when the elevator doors close on a small Clarice Starling, clad in a gray sweatshirt, surrounded only by men in uniform red, and so tall they appear almost faceless.
It doesn’t feel good to be the Queen, or to be Clarice — it is a burden, not a privilege, to be the only one in the room — but the beauty in surviving your time as a living embodiment of either comes in pulling other women up with you, and disrupting the boys’ club with your collective presence.
This is something articulated beautifully in Moran’s novel, whose bubbly tone belies a profound frustration and sadness that, to all too many, will be relatable. Because while Dolly’s on the ascent, a lack of welcome or allies isn’t the only obstacle in her way. She’s held back variously by a number of cads who are interested in derailing the career of a teenage girl — or simply unaware that by viewing her merely as a sex object or potential conquest, as they invariably do, they immediately devalue her as a colleague, and a human with her own inner life. As one character aptly puts it: “There is a terrible narcissism in the kind of man who wants to be the one to be with, and change, a young woman.”
So, fair warning: Hideous men make frequent appearances in “How to Be Famous.” The worst is a comedian who films women he brings home with him without their consent, and whose public humiliation of Dolly unleashes a storm of unwanted attention. This, along with other, smaller slights accumulates into a picture of an industry that enables predatory men, and denigrates young women — whether they’re fans, critics, or musicians.
“How to Be Famous” is a subversive celebration of those young women. Dolly is a heroine who will likely be described as “irrepressible,” a lazy, gendered term for “strong and nuanced.” In reading her story, I realized what has so often been left out of narratives about music writing and alternative media. “Almost Famous” is great, but Dolly’s survival in her vocation of choice is a much more fraught proposition than Cameron Crowe’s jet-setting with groupies. In an industry that does not value her voice or her safety, Dolly makes her way, bolstered by the support of her unhinged punk-rock pals, her benignly dysfunctional family, and her own insistence on creating her identity and taking up space.
In the end, she finds love and a sense of solidarity with other women in her industry that reminded me of every bathroom-sink conversation I’ve had with fellow women writers, about the whispers and the warnings and mutual support. Something to always remember is that women talk to each other. And reading “How to Be Famous” shows how far we can go when we listen to each other, when we see the bad odds, complain to each other over whiskey, and then do the thing anyway, because it’s our job.
_____
“How to Be Famous” by Caitlin Moran, HarperCollins, 337 pp., $26.99