How to Build a Girl

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Now a major motion picture starring Beanie Feldstein! The New York Times bestselling author hailed as &;the UK&;s answer to Tina Fey, Chelsea Handler, and Lena Dunham all rolled into one&; (Marie Claire) makes her fiction debut with a hilarious yet deeply moving coming of age novel. What do you do in your teenage years when you realize what your parents taught you wasn&;t enough? You must go out and find books and poetry and pop songs and bad heroes&;and build yourself. It&;s 1990. Johanna Morrigan, fourteen, has shamed herself so badly on local TV that she decides that there&;s no point in being Johanna anymore and reinvents herself as Dolly Wilde&;fast-talking, hard-drinking Gothic hero and full-time Lady Sex Adventurer. She will save her poverty-stricken Bohemian family by becoming a writer&;like Jo in Little Women, or the Bröntes&;but without the dying young bit. By sixteen, she&;s smoking cigarettes, getting drunk and working for a music paper. She&;s writing pornographic letters to rock-stars, having all the kinds of sex with all kinds of men, and eviscerating bands in reviews of 600 words or less. But what happens when Johanna realizes she&;s built Dolly with a fatal flaw? Is a box full of records, a wall full of posters, and a head full of paperbacks, enough to build a girl after all? Imagine The Bell Jar written by Rizzo from Grease. How to Build a Girl is a funny, poignant, and heartbreakingly evocative story of self-discovery and invention, as only Caitlin Moran could tell it.