Big hair, black eyeliner, strong opinions and with absolutely no intention of giving up on the world just yet: the unstoppable Caitlin Moran talks to Melissa Blease on feminism, fellas, family, cider, civilisation and finding reasons to be hopeful when everything around us seems to be… broken (Photography credit: Dora Paphides)
“Eyeliner is a practical makeup; unlike lipstick, once you’ve put it on, it’s going nowhere…”
Now I’d never imagined discussing eyeliner with a writer who’s made brilliant sense of the world we live in in her very own uniquely erudite, confidently opinionated way since she first hit our collective cultural consciousness in 1991. But then again: why not? That eyeliner is, along with Very Big Hair, a Caitlin Moran trademark – and she has a well-informed opinion on pretty much any subject you’d care to throw at her.
A lifetime of rich experience informs the woman who has described her success as “a powerful mandate that gives me the freedom to speak my mind”. She changed her name from Catherine when she was 14 years old, her new moniker inspired by a character in Jilly Cooper’s 1988 bonkbuster Rivals. She’s the home-educated eldest of seven siblings who grew up on a council estate in Wolverhampton, and began her writing career at the age of 16 as a journalist for seminal weekly music newspaper Melody Maker. She went on to write three semi-autobiographical novels and three non-fiction manifestos including the multi award-winning, global best-seller How To Be A Woman and, since 1992, she’s contributed two weekly columns to The Times and published two anthologies of collections from those columns. She’s also recently launched Outsiding, a new podcast which she co-hosts (in her own garden) with TV gardening presenter Adam Frost…
Say wha-a-a-t? The woman who once said that she loves to shock people by using an infamously divisive word for female anatomy as often as she can because “the reaction is like saying I have a nuclear bomb in my pants, or a tiger, or a gun” is co-hosting a podcast with one of the UK’s most famous horticulturists?
“Yup, me and Adam sitting in my garden talking about growing tomatoes with celebrity guests!” Caitlin laughs. “We need more upbeat, joyful, hopeful stuff about just doing what you love!” To this end… Caitlin’s new book How to Be Hopeful is published by Ebury Press on Thursday 17 September – and three days later, she’ll be sharing it with all of us at Komedia, here in Bath. But Caitlin: were you ever not hopeful?
“I’m essentially a sort of optimist,” she says (talking, as I come to learn, at standard Caitlin speed, circa 100wpm). “But optimism is really hard to maintain when everybody around you is saying what terrible times we’re living in. It gets to a point where it feels impolite to say that you’re hopeful – you run the risk of sounding foolish.
“In the build-up to the new book, I’d been through a massive menopause, I was knackered, I was spending a lot of time on social media, and things had just got darker and more chaotic. In the end I was like, right, that’s it; I’m going to run away from society, buy a farm and start my own civilisation from scratch. And then I found out how much it costs to do that; only multi-millionaires can afford those apocalypse bolt holes. So I took a step back and thought, okay, in my life, for me, is there a way of being hopeful in the 21st century? I wrote a list of things that I thought might improve my life… and that’s basically what the book is. I only really write books when I’ve gone through something bad and learned how to cope with it, and by the end of this experiment I thought right, I have some useful information here, and maybe other people could benefit from this information and feel a bit better about their lives too.”
The vibe has been everything is f****d and we’re all f****d, right? I just don’t think we can keep on like
that for much longer.
So could How to Be Hopeful be described as a kind of self-help book? While neither confirming nor denying this, Caitlin’s answer is interesting. “Over the last 10, 15 years the vibe has been everything is fd and we’re all fd, right? I just don’t think we can keep on like that for much longer. Anxiety and depression in young people has already gone through the roof, they all think this is the worst time in history. Yes, we’ve definitely got problems, but this isn’t the worst time in history; there’s no Black Death, we’re not being bombed by an enemy nation. We’re in a period of change but the best way to deal with that is to try to feel a bit more hopeful and confident – and we can do that!”
Can we really, though, when so much around us – particularly, I believe, for women – seems to have ditched progression?
“It’s all cyclical,” Caitlin says. “And we’ve come a very long way! I remember watching the BBC around 15 years ago: all-male panels on everything from Have I Got News For You to Question Time and Newsnight.
That was when the campaigner Caroline Criado Perez started the Women’s Room with Catherine Smith and campaigned for the first ever statue of a woman [suffragette Millicent Fawcett] to be erected in Parliament Square, and to have women on banknotes. That was the kind of thing that feminists used to do in those days – like, see a problem and then fix it – and feminism just isn’t in that space at the moment. It’ll happen again, though; these things ebb and flow. And at the moment, it’s the men and teenage boys who’ve got problems – that’s a crisis that no one’s solved.”
Ah, but Caitlin had a go at solving that crisis in her 2023 book What About Men. “Yes I did! But I was a year too early,” she says. “If I’d have published that book when Adolescence came out everybody would have loved it, but all the reviews at the time were going, there isn’t a problem with boys!” Would she return to that particular fray, with yet more hindsight? “Only if there was more to say than I’ve already written. I was quite proud of that book because I really think that I identified the problems and the solutions; a lot of it was funny, a lot of it was serious, and I put it all out there.”
As we’ve established, Caitlin is a Mistress of the Art of ‘putting it all out there’ – she doesn’t hold back, and never shies away. But what do her daughters (Caitlin and her music journalist/broadcaster husband Pete Paphides have two, aged 23 and 25) make of having their mum’s entire life history at their fingertips for reference to navigate them at any point along the long, arduous journey to adulthood and beyond?
“I’d only know the answer to that question if one of my daughters ever read one of my books!” Caitlin howls.
“One of their rules has been never to read a word that I write. In the dedication at the front of Moranifesto [2017] I wrote, to my daughters, “if you’re reading this, come to me and I’ll give you my credit card number and you can buy whatever you want” – and they’ve never taken me up on it!”
Maybe one day Caitlin’s daughters will get around to bankrupting her. But right here, right now…
“I really do love my job!” she says. “Even when I’m on holiday I get up early to write. And I love pottering around my garden, I love my kids, I love my friends – all the ones I’ve got left are proper, solid, keepers; I don’t have any room for any new ones!”
And what about “cava, eyeliner, hair embiggening and The Struggle”, as outlined in her Who’s Who entry (oh of course Caitlin has made it to Who’s Who!)?
“All I’d change about that listing is to swap cava for a pint of cold cider because I can’t metabolise the enzymes in white wine anymore; I turn into a lunatic on cava!” she laughs. “But eyeliner, hair embiggening and The Struggle are all lifetime interests.”
Ah, same here! And it turns out that Caitlin and I have met before too, back when she was a fledgling journalist on Melody Maker andI was an already-cynical hack working for Record Mirror. “Oh gawd, I was probably drunk and loud wasn’t I?”, she says. “But it was the 90s, right? Drunk and loud was what we did! But I’ve been very lucky, my career has all been a series of flukes!” she insists; “I could have screwed up in so many ways…”
But Caitlin didn’t choose any of those ways – and if she ever does screw up, she’ll no doubt turn the tale of how she did it into a triumphant, inspirational, best-selling success..
Caitlin Moran:
How To Be Hopeful | Komedia | Sunday 20 September, 1:30 pm
For all event details and tickets, visit: komediabath.co.uk
Her book, How to be Hopeful is available from 17 September