Caitlan Moran and the dream of young love.

I feel sick. Totally and utterly sick. Today I had my very first shift at my new part-time job (for those that are interested it is a second part-time job to compliment my first part-time job while being a care-free student) and seeing the married couple I work for interact with each other... Oh yuk! They were so very happy and loving in each others company after being married for over twenty whole years... I know my own parents are very happy together after thirty years but one can at least overlook it when it is one's own parents as one wants them to be happy but seeing another couple not all disgustingly over each other but merely interacting beautifully and complimenting each other so well... I left feeling happy in my new job but so lacking and empty. This feeling was not at all helped by downloading and starting to read Caitlin Moran's book 'How to be a Woman' for although she used to be wonderfully gauche and ugly (while but a mere teenager just as one used to be while a teenager) she founded love frightfully early and so married and copulated jolly early too and actually had her first child in her mid twenties... and so although enjoying her book very much I must agree with the dreadfully bad reviews in one point so far: she does sound so horribly smug.

I hate to say to say it for I adore her and her penmanship. But she does come across as smug. I put most of this down to finding Mr Right when she was so very young. And frankly who can deny her that? But by being pure chance the sort of women who identify with Caitlin, women like me who feel like we are different in whatever way, we lose her at that very point because we are incapable of appreciating or understanding her choices after meeting the right chap. Of course this is not her fault and yes she does make lots of wonderful points about why meeting the right one is not the end and about how there are many more mountains to conquer, but all the same to we women that are waiting it is neither heartening nor enlightening for it misses out such an interesting (and lets face it engrossing and all-consuming) period of womanhood, the search for the Right Man.

So through no fault of her own (indeed arguably to her great good fortune) she has happened to miss the courtship period of a woman's life. Now although I may be placed by some in the category of modern feminist I hesitate to grant myself such a title as I don't believe the term has been properly agreed upon. However, I do think that to call this book By Moran a modern feminist book in any sense it should not skip over and therefore null such a significant period of the modern woman's life. So for that, quite apart from all the frankly easily skimmed ranting portions of the book, I would much rather class it as an autobiography than any sort of feminist text as they are selling it.


The truth is that she has simply been very lucky in finding her true love at the tender age of nineteen and although wonderful for her it is not great for anyone else to read, even those who earlier empathised about being an outside with her. Oh that we all were so lucky. I wish I had also found the man I would adore and marry aged but nineteen... Yet poor old Moran for many like me, fans of her column, are criticising her for simply having that good fortune... But in at least one point we are right and her wrong... this does not make a book.