Born in Brighton in 1975 and raised in Wolverhampton, Caitlin Moran was home-educated along with her seven siblings, and wrote her first novel, The Chronicles of Narmo, aged 15. A Times columnist from the age of 18, Moran published the international bestseller How to Be a Woman in 2011. Her two anthologies of journalism, Moranthology (2012) and Moranifesto (2016), were Sunday Times bestsellers, and her novel How to Build a Girl (2014), is being adapted into a movie. She also co-wrote the Rose d’Or-winning Channel 4 sitcom Raised By Wolves (2015) with her sister Caroline Moran. She has been columnist of the year four times, and interviewer of the year once. The paperback of Moranifesto (Ebury £8.99) is out next week.
1 | Website
Yoga With Adriene, YouTube
Twenty years of sitting on my arse typing had really taken it out of me. I was waking up in the morning and hobbling around, making “OOOOF!” sounds until gone 2pm. Then I found Yoga With Adriene. She’s this jolly Texan girl – quite giggly and silly; loves her alt-rock – who has millions of yoga tutorials on YouTube. For the first nine months, all I did was sit in the one-legged pigeon pose and stretch out my arse while going “ARGH!”, like a pirate, in relief. I posted about her on Facebook last year, and loads of my writer friends got hooked on her. Now we all talk about how much better our glutes feel. I like to think the Bloomsbury set did similar.
2 | Radio
In Our Time, Radio 4
It’s one of those things you take for granted, In Our Time. In that you know it’s there, but you’re like, “Great you’re doing that, Melvyn – but I’m a bit too busy to listen to you explaining Diderot to me right now.” However, post-Adriene, I now sit in the one-legged pigeon while Melvyn and a couple of experts run through Paine’s Common Sense, or the history of utilitarianism, and have now basically given myself a pretty nifty crash-course in humanity, while also working my core. Melvyn’s tactful catchphrase to the more florid experts – “Could you unpack that a little?” – is now my go-to phrase when someone has uttered a load of incomprehensible bollocks, and you want them to start speaking normally.
3 | TV show
RuPaul’s Drag Race
“We’re all born naked – and the rest is drag” is RuPaul’s catchphrase, and when it comes to the “performative” elements of being a woman, we have much to learn from drag queens. They make all that stuff seem joyful, creative and fun again. I’m so proud and relieved that, instead of watching the Kardashians, my teenage daughters watch a show where fierce, funny men make their own clothes out of bath mats, sing, joke, support each other, and know that the best night out is to make your hair huge, wear triple-leopardskin, and lip-sync for your life to Olivia Newton-John. It takes a drag queen to show you how to be a happy woman, it seems.
4 | Media
The New York Times / the Guardian / the Times / the Washington Post / Wikipedia / Brain Pickings / the New Yorker
All the medias you would expect, but my big thing this year – post-Trump, post-fake news – has been making sure I have a subscription to all of them. It suddenly came into focus – how you need to pay for this stuff, man. I want these guys to have resources to keep finding things out. It’s easy to be like, “Ah, I’ll do it later” when they ask for payment. But you can’t pay your New York Times subscription from a post-apocalyptic wasteland. One answer to watching the news and screaming, “WHAT DO I DO, I’M SO SCARED!?!?!?” is “Pay your news-subs, dude.” Another is “Drink more gin”.
5 | Book
The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, Selina Todd
This is such a powerful, joyous book – a telling of a century of British working-class history, but with a slant on women, communities, culture and change. The big take-home I had is how brilliant, creative and powerful the working classes have been: we invented the weekend! The nightclub! The library! It’s not a trite story – nor one with a happy ending. Over and over, progress is crushed. But it also reminds you how much can – and does – change when someone, somewhere, at the bottom of the heap, has an idea and fights until it happens.
6 | Film
Hairspray (2007)
When people go on about “classic musicals” – see La La Land – they never mention this, but I can’t see how a musical could be more perfect, and I’ve seen them all. Based on the earlier John Waters movie, it’s about a fat girl whose love of “race records”, agoraphobic drag-queen mother (John Travolta) and friends sees her eventually ending segregation in 1960s Baltimore. Michelle Pfeiffer plays a bitch, Zac Efron parodies everything he did in High School Musical with hot glee, everyone has huge hair, and no one doesn’t enjoy seeing washer-woman Travolta, in a nightie, bashing period-stains out of a pair of panties with a rock.
7 | Restaurant
Your actual house
In these times of austerity, I think it’s good to remember there’s nothing better than a baked potato, in your house. You want the outside hard – like a crisp – and the inside rendered almost mad, with more butter than most people would think reasonable. Note, to them: there is never an unreasonable amount of butter. In the words of Irene Cara’s Fame, “Too much is never enough.” There’s no doubt in my mind she was singing about spuds.
8 | Music
Help Is Coming, Crowded House
This is such an astonishing song – never properly released, as the band have such an embarrassment of melodies, they can’t keep count. Last year, during one of a million “darkest moments” in the Syrian refugee crisis, me and my husband contacted Crowded House and asked if we could, finally, release it, to raise funds for Save the Children, as the lyrics – “Empires crumbling/ Fear is running/ Escape the anguish of our past” – seemed so appropriate. They agreed, and you can still listen to it, see the amazing video made by Supersonic director Mat Whitecross, watch Benedict Cumberbatch’s beautiful introduction – quoting Warsan Shire – and donate, here, if you’d like.
