How To Build A Girl (4*)

Caitlin Moran leaves no doubt that girls like to spank the monkey as much boys which I found a little shocking until I started laughing.  Loudly.  

Thankfully, around that time I decided to combat my burgeoning underarm odor issues by shoplifting a bottle of Mum roll-on deodorant, and realize on the bus on the way home that it was shaped--astonishingly, usefully, blatantly--like a cheerful, chunky cock.  With its pink domed lid and carefully contoured bottle, the thinking behind British teenage girls' most popular deodorant of the late 1980s was a truth hidden in plain views:  Proctor & Gamble were selling adolescent girls Starter Dildos for 79p.

Did they know?  Of course they knew.  The knew--and they were playing mind games with us.  For what reason--other than a knowing sadistic streak--would they have named something millions of teenage girls were rapping themselves with "Mum"?  It was their way of fucking with our minds.  The real test of how horny we were.  Are you so desperate that you'd have sex with your Mum?  To which my simple answer was--locking the bedroom door and lying on the floor--"Yes."

But optimism is equally critical in building Dolly, a smart, insecure woman who chooses her fake first name with as much panache as she wears a top hat.  Moran somehow manages to integrate the kind of self-help shit that usually has me rolling my eyes into a feel-good coming of age story.

We're just, simply, in the world.  It never occurred to me what a wonderful thing this was. Or perhaps it did, a long time ago--but I had forgotten.  I am so happy to be alive.  That the point of life is joy--to make it, to receive it.  That the earth is a treasure box of people and places and song, and that every day you can plunge your arms in and find a new, ridiculous, perfect delight.

***

Until--slowly, slowly--you make a viable version of you, one you can hum every day.  You'll find the tiny, right piece of grit you can pearl around, until nature kicks in, and your shell will just quietly fill with magic, even while you're busy doing other things.  What your nurture began, nature will take over, and start completing, until you stop having to think about who you'll be entirely--as you're too busy doing, now.  And ten years will pass without you even noticing.

***

But one day you'll find a version of you that will get kissed, or befriended, or inspired, and you will make your notes accordingly, staying up all night to hone and improvise upon a tiny snatch of melody that worked.

On occasion, she's even profound.  Like when Dolly discovers what family support of her self-fulfilling choices has cost them.

I'm learning a whole new thing:  that sometimes, love isn't observable or noisy or tangible. That sometimes, love is anonymous.  Sometimes, love is silent.  Sometimes, love just stands there when you're calling it a cunt, biting its tongue and waiting.

Nick Hornby, watch out.