Author of the week: Caitlin Moran

last updated 8 January 2015

Caitlin Moran is preparing to mount her own one-woman British Invasion, said Jesse Ellison in TheDailyBeast.com. After 20 years of “pretending to be normal” while working at the buttoned-up London Times, the 37-year-old columnist created a smash hit in the U.K. last year with her brash autobiography, How to Be a Woman. Newly released in the U.S., the book offers a funny, unabashedly honest take on modern womanhood. “So much of being a woman is about keeping secrets,” Moran says. “True things about being a woman—bleeding, masturbating, being pregnant...you’re led to believe that if you’re ever truthful about all these bad things, you’d be socially ostracized. The thing that I’ve realized is if you actually do say these things, nothing bad happens.”

Moran’s book is more than just an autobiography, said Peggy Orenstein in Slate.com. At its core is a spirited defense of contemporary feminism. Described by Moran as “Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch written from a barstool,” it takes women to task for, among other things, considering feminism unfashionable. “What part of ‘liberation for women’ is not for you?” Moran writes. “Is it freedom to vote? The right not to be owned by the man you marry? ‘Vogue’ by Madonna? Jeans? Did all that good s--- GET ON YOUR NERVES?” Her ultimate goal, says Moran, is revolution, to change the world for the sake of her young daughters: “I have six years to make it into a feminist paradise so my little girls won’t get screwed up.”