Amazing!! Once again Caitlin Moran encompasses the myriad of issues that women encounter and deal with each and every day. She covers a variety of topics including (but not limited to) loving your body, Botox, and helping a loved one cope with an eating disorder.

This book is insightful, funny, and at times heartbreaking. After reading her writings, I always feel happy and better about myself and proud to be a woman!!!
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Funny account of stages in female life, but with incredibly touching and wise comments on the lives of young women. One of the author's daughters became anorexic and self-harming. Fortunately, she recovered. But Moran comments on the burden our generation has laid on the young. We sit around the living room or dinner table discussing everything that is wrong with the world--whether we are a liberal family worried about racial inequality, climate warming and income discrepancies or a conservative family worried about declining moral standards, rising crime and loss of freedom. Then we turn and say, "But is doesn't matter that _our_ generation has screwed things up--because the next generation is _amazing_. . . . ----you kids are incredible. The kids will save the earth." She continues: "So what we're essentially saying is the most terrifying thing a child can hear: _Save Mommy and Daddy. We don't know what to do_." She concludes, specific to the problems of girls in our society: "We do not make being a grown woman look like an appealing job. We do not sell the idea that being a woman is, yes, difficult--but also amazing, and joyous, and powerful, and freeing. We do not show them a world where we value the skills of women or seek out their knowledge. . . . Currently what eleven-year-old girl would volunteer for growing into a woman?

Hitherto I've avoided reading any books by Caitlin Moran. It's not because I don't think they'll be any good - I enjoy her column every Saturday in The Times magazine and most weeks envy her linguistic cleverness and fierce, witty intelligence. No, it's just because she's always come across as a bit annoying. Brilliant, but in that precocious child self-satisfied way. A grown up who never managed to mentally evolve beyond her student days of grungy clothes and getting naked when she gets drunk.

However, if Moran was standing in front of me now I'd look her in the eye and apologise. Well, partly apologise, for I do think she was like the above for a long time, but if this book is to believed she's finally grown up (extreme eyeliner excepted).

As the prime target audience for this book (i.e. a middle-aged woman and mother), this book made me laugh out loud at times but it also touched me really quite deeply in places. For Moran exposes with brutal honesty what it's like to be a middle-aged woman in current times, a world where we spend years utterly exhausted from the juggling of jobs and housework and child rearing and parental caring and realise we need to be 'more than a woman'. We need to be several women.

Your previous problems were all problems with yourself. Young woman problems. But when you enter middle age, you'll know you're middle-aged, because all your problems are... other people's problems.

I kept coming back to that paragraph, as it so neatly sums up what makes this stage in life tough.

Whilst parts of the book are a passionate polemic against the various injustices that women continue to fight against (safe streets, equal pay, etc.), this book is more than a clever feminist manifesto. Yes, Moran is passionate about fighting women's corner, but she's also pretty much up for fighting just about everyone's corner and trying to make the world just a teeny bit better to live in. In one chapter she rails about the issues modern men are dealing with and how expectations on how men should 'be' sadly often leaves them with no one to talk to when the going gets tough. In another deeply sad chapter she talks about dealing with her teenage daughter who has developed a serious eating disorder and made several attempts on her life, and how difficult it is when normal motherly nurturing urges not only cannot bring her around but moreover often makes things worse. Yet interspersed with rallying cries for change and insightful commentaries on the world around us are hilarious witticisms and one-liners that had me chortling away to myself.

Perhaps one of the most refreshing things about Moran is that she's that rare breed of someone who is utterly content in her own skin, neck wattle and all, and that self-contentment makes for what is ultimately a rallying cry of hope and possibility rather than bitterness and reproach.

4.5 stars - honest, insightful, hilarious. All hail being a middle-aged woman. ( )

I’m generally a pretty big fan of Caitlin Moran’s writing, but this latest book wasn’t quite 100% for me. Which is understandable, since she’s writing from the perspective of a fully middle aged mum with teenage daughters… That being said, she has some very smart points to make, and I still had quite a few chuckles along the way, because in many ways her life experience is a teaching moment for those of us still on the come up. What do we have to look forward to in our middle ages? According to Moran many, many excellent things (the accepting of the comfortable-if-less-fashionable shoes, for one), even if there are some inevitable lifestyle changes that we won’t see coming (like the inability to get totally blotto without feeling like death the next day). I may have hit some of these milestones already (the never-ending list is indeed, never ending), but there was so much of Moran’s life that I will never experience (the whole raising children schtick) that even though I found amusement in her words I found myself feeling quite separate from her experience. Not that this is a bad thing, just an opportunity to listen to the life experience of a woman who chose a different path, and did so with a sense of humour and pathos along the way. ( )

More Than a Woman picks up where Caitlin Moran's wildly popular How to Be a Woman left off. Moran is a mother of two feminist girls both thriving and struggling with adolescence. She analyzes her daughter's destructive eating disorder, her own aging body, touches on the COVID-19 pandemic, and how far feminism has come along with the resulting criticism and backlash. Moran does all this with the wit and humor she has become known for.
The greatest criticism I have heard of Caitlin Moran is that her brand of feminism lacks intersectionality. More Than a Woman is her first book that I have read through the lens of that criticism. I acknowledge that she only briefly touches on intersectional topics. I would like to give her grace because the book is about herself and if she does not identify with other intersections then it is not her story to tell. With that said, I enjoyed More Than a Woman. I identified with many of her observations. I would recommend it to feminists, both good, bad, and aging.
#MoreThanaWoman #NetGalley ( )