Moranifesto

by Caitlin Moran

  How, when I’m in the car with him and he accelerates, or reverses into a very tight parking space, I can’t help making small, primal squeaking noises of excitement.

  And, still, staying nice and dry while I’m taken up the Big Sainsbury’s.

  “Pete,” I say, eventually, “I think you might be right. I might actually love you because of the car.”

  But I say it quietly, because I don’t want to wake him. He’s got to get up early for the school run tomorrow.

  Reading Is Fierce

  Because I was a home-educated, part-feral child, nearly everything I am was collated from books. I read myself a new brain, and then a new life—I venerated books like others venerate jewels, or land. And then . . . I kind of forgot. I spent ten years forgetting what a book can be—and what you are, when you read a book—until I was asked to judge the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, in 2014. We gave the award, in the end, to Eimear McBride’s extraordinary A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, which I recommend until I burst. I am sure there are girls out there reading it now who are having their lives changed as surely as mine was by the volumes by my bed twenty years before.

  Since I had kids I’ve had the perfect excuse not to read: I have kids.

  “Where would I find the time?” I tetched at inquisitors—a sorrowful committee of literary characters in my head who were sad that I didn’t hang out with them anymore.

  “It’s all right for you, Gandalf, Jane Eyre, Oswald Bastable, Boo Radley, and the sexy blokes out of Riders,” I continued as they looked accusatory. “You’re all childless. You don’t have to walk in the pissing rain to the nursery, then get back in time to put on a wash. Get bent.”

  “When you were young, you used to read a book a day,” Prince Andrei Nikolayevich reminded me, sadly. “Although, to be fair, you did only manage War and Peace in a day by skipping through all the passages on farming while shouting, ‘WHERE ARE THE SEXY BITS?’ But now look at you—reading just ten books a year.”

  “Yeah,” a random alcoholic man from a Raymond Carver short story agreed. “You’re out of the game, lady.”

  The random Raymond Carver alcoholic then started trying to unadvisedly bum a lift from someone in J. G. Ballard’s Crash, and I had to simply walk away from them, before it got messy, in order to put the tea on.

  It was against this perfect excuse, then, that when I was asked to be a judge on the Baileys Prize, I surprised myself by saying “yes.”

  “It means reading fifty-nine books in five months,” they warned.

  “I can handle fifty-nine books in five months!” I said, cheerfully. “I’m going to become a reader again!”

  Three weeks later, and I was physically sick with literature. It was a rainy day, and I’d spent ten hours straight reading Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, finished it, put it down, and then did five hours on Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam, until two a.m. I’d gone from a book set in a New Zealand gold rush town in 1866—all muddy skirts, opium, shipwrecked boats, and murder—to a dystopian future where human clones and superintelligent pigs scrabbled in the postapocalyptic rubble. My brain reeled like a drunken gyroscope—I was both discombobulated and elated. I was alight. I was exhausted. I was flying.

  Because what judging a literary prize did was remind me of what I knew when I was eleven and wiser, and forgot as I got older and stupider: that reading is not a passive act. That it’s amusing that “bookworms” are thought of as weak, bespectacled, and pale—withdrawn from the world, easy to beat in a fight.

  For a reader is not a simple consumer—as you are listening to a record, or watching a movie. A reader is something far more noble, dangerous, and exhilarating—they are a co-artist.

  Your mind is the projection screen every writer steals; it is the firing of your neurons that makes every book come alive. You are the electricity that turns it on. A book cannot live until the touch of your hand on the first page brings it alive. A writer is essentially typing blank pages—shouting out spells in the dark—until the words are read by you, and the magic explodes into your head, and no one else’s.

  Consider me, now. If I type “dragon”—casually, just six letters, no effort for me—suddenly, a dragon appears in your mind. You have to make it. Your brain fires up—perhaps your heartbeat will speed a little, depending on if you have had previous unhappy experiences with dragons. Perhaps you will have given her golden claws—or maybe you have a fondness for tight black shiny scales, instead. But however closely I have described her, she will still be your dragon—in your head, a result of your million tiny acts of birth. And no one else will ever see her.

  And so to read is, in truth, to be in the constant act of creation. That old lady on the bus with her Orwell, the businessman on the Tube with Patricia Cornwell, the teenager roaring through Capote—they are not engaged in idle pleasure. Their heads are on fire. Their hearts are flooding. With a book, you are the landscape, the sets, the snow, the hero, the kiss—you are the mathematical calculation that plots the trajectory of the blazing, crashing zeppelin. You—pale, punchable reader—are terraforming whole worlds in your head, which will remain with you until the day you die. These books are as much a part of you as your guts, and your bone. And when your guts fail and your bones break, Narnia, or Jamaica Inn, or Gormenghast will still be there: as pin-sharp and bright as the day you first imagined them—hiding under the bedclothes, sitting on the bus. Exhausted, on a rainy day, weeping over the death of someone you never met, and who was nothing more than words until you transfused them with your time, and your love, and the imagination you constantly dismiss as “just being a bit of a bookworm.”

  So this is what I remembered as I judged a literary prize this summer. Being a reader. The unseen, life-changing duet you sing with anyone who’s ever written a book.

  Austerity—They Killed My Library

  I’ve written about libraries before, in Moranthology—how my local library was a cross between a life raft, an emergency exit, and a festival—theme park of the soul, cathedral of the imagination.

  I went back to my library, in the winter of 2015. And what I saw broke my heart.

  I went up and saw some of the austerity last month.

  I hadn’t intended to—I was just visiting my old hometown—but I ended up in my local library: the one I lived in between the ages of five and fifteen. And there, in the library, was some austerity. A visible thing. Something you could mark on a map, with a pin.

  I’ve written about that library before. About how this place was the delight of my life—a thing I would have married, in my prepubescent anthropomorphic phase. I would have been as happy as a clam—and if the gods had so blessed us, in later years, I would have got pregnant by that library, and we would have raised a couple of little mobile libraries together.

  It was a 1960s red-brick cube, with the shelving inside packed tight. And the shelving had to be packed tight, for there were so many books inside—that place was rammed full of every and any kind of book you could think of. Carousels of “trashy” paperbacks. Big shelves for atlases, and illustrated histories of the wars. Smaller shelves for hardback fiction. Audiobooks, which I was very snobbish about. “I have read 337 books,” I wrote in my diary. “I mean properly read—with my eyes. Not audiobooks.”

  I learned everything there. Sex, witchcraft, baking, butchery, geography, navigation. I read Larkin sitting on the lawn outside, and I cried to be the real girl, in a real place, from his “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album.”

  That library was a Pandorica of fabulous, interwoven randomness, as rich as plum cake. Push a seed of curiosity in between any two books, and it would grow, overnight, into a rain forest hot with monkeys and jaguars and blowpipes and clouds. The room was full, and my head was full. What a magical system to place around a penniless girl.

  But then—twenty-first-century austerity. I knew what the cuts had done to libraries—I’d seen the piles of books for sale outside libraries in Swindon, and in Barnet. But they we
ren’t my libraries—so I couldn’t calibrate what was being thrown out, and what was being kept. I could when I went back to Wolverhampton, though—because that library is the inside of my head. I know everything about it.

  And everything had gone—or near enough to make no difference. Most of the stern, tight shelving gone—and all that was left was racks of Andy McNab, and Fifty Shades, and rip-offs of Fifty Shades. So few books. Weepingly few books.

  To the side, a single lonely carousel labeled “Classics”—in the midst of all the pink and gold embossed lettering, the Brontë and Dickens looking like martinets in the middle of a hen night. And, by the door, old books piled high, for sale: the history books, the maps, the novels and poetry.

  Now, you may say we have no need for reference books anymore, now that we have the Internet. Why go to a library (because you need to get out of the house! because you will die if you stay in the house!) when you could just Google something (because you have no computer! because you are old, or poor, or in a valley where broadband does not venture!), instead?

  Well, because a search engine will just show you what is most popular—rather than what is best. You, like a billion other Googlers, will be herded to the footage of a shark biting a man, or the same shallow Wikipedia entry: we are all reading the same ten thousand words, walking the same paths, thinking the same thoughts, filtered through the single lens of Google. We are approaching a monoknowledge—diametrics herding us, migrations of thought as unquestioning as a million dumb buffalo.

  But do we need libraries to be clever? What is wrong with a room containing only light modern fiction about mercenaries and submissive sex? Can the working classes not have rooms of cheap pleasure?

  What’s wrong is this: it will not survive. If you take the intelligence and knowledge out of a library—if you take away the purposefulness, the usefulness, so that it is filled only with sugary treats—then when the next round of austerity cuts come in, that library will die. No one will fight for it—no one can fight for a room like that. How could you argue to put money into that neutered, monosyllabic, intellectually sterile room when [hand gesture] hospitals and [hand gesture] schools need it more?

  This is a tactic we must all grow furious about. That when something cannot be axed straightaway—because it is important, because it is loved, because people protest—that thing is then starved, or bled, until it is a weak, mutant ghost. Until no one wishes to defend it. Until no one can defend it—because all the words they could have learned, and used, are now heaped up by the door, for sale.

  Until, walking into that room again, twenty years later, you cry, “My God, my love—what have they done to you? What have they done to your brilliant, brilliant mind?”

  12 Years a Slave

  As discussed in Part One, one of the key things we need to get our heads around is that change doesn’t come all at once—it comes in tiny steps. And even though you wish for great steps—giant steps—even though your well-being depends upon it—you cannot, in your desire for giant steps, crush those making tiny steps. And, so, 12 Years a Slave.

  During the buildup to the Oscars, there was an interesting debate about race in film, centering around 12 Years a Slave. While most agreed it was a beautifully made film, there were commentators who were disappointed that this was yet another story where black characters were shown powerless in a white-dominated world—stripped of any joy or self-dominion, and rendered down into little more than a pornographization of helpless, miserable survival.

  At the New York Film Critics Circle awards, in January, Steve McQueen was heckled by black critic Armond White as “an embarrassing doorman and garbage man” for making a film that was little more than “a slavery horror-show . . . torture-porn.”

  In the Guardian, meanwhile, black commentator Orville Lloyd Douglas explained why he would be seeing neither The Butler nor 12 Years a Slave: “I’m convinced these black race films are created for a white, liberal audience to engender white guilt.”

  In short, these were not films that a wealthy, ascendant black film industry would make for a black audience—but the unhappy product of black creativity having to look for funding from a white-dominated industry, and play out to white audiences, who were mainly propelled to the cinema, popcorn in hand, out of liberal shame.

  Or, as Golden Globes host Amy Poehler summed it up: “12 Years a Slave, what a film. It totally changed the way I look at slavery.”

  While it would obviously be to all of humanity’s joyous betterment if the roles available to actors of color could be expanded out from “gangster” and “horrifically abused slave,” ultimately, I feel about 12 Years a Slave triumphing at the Oscars the same way I did about Fifty Shades of Grey.

  For years, we fretted that society wasn’t allowing female sexuality free expression—that the conversation was dominated by male-created pornography, and however many highbrow conversations about it we tried to jump-start, it just wasn’t crossing over into a mainstream conversation.

  Then Fifty Shades of Grey became a phenomenon—one hundred million copies sold—and many went, “But this wasn’t the conversation about female sexuality we wanted. This isn’t about a powerful woman unashamedly indulging in rococo sexual liberation. It’s all about a shy teenage girl being beaten on the clitoris in exchange for an iPad, instead. This is the wrong revolution. I don’t like it.”

  But the thing is, when you’re starting a revolution—by which I mean altering the landscape so that new voices become dominant—you have to take the longer view. The simple fact is, Fifty Shades kicked the doors in and, more importantly, made a lot of money. Publishing is a business, like any other. It will go where the money is. Now that there is, thanks to Fifty Shades, a huge new market for “women writing about their sexuality,” there will be a lot more women writing about their sexuality—and they will write different books, better books, bolder books. But they will all be fueled by that first, imperfect kick start of Fifty Shades.

  Because the history of change is that someone has to start the conversation. Someone has to be fearless enough to go to that new place. But if we attack those who start valuable new conversations—the writers, directors, and actors—for not delivering the perfect revolution, whole, straight off the bat—we scare off the next generation of writers, directors, and actors. We end up having no new conversations at all.

  The single biggest mistake made by cultural commentators—critics, academics, bloggers, political activists—is to attack the artists for the failings of the industry they’re working in. It’s like those moments when the activist Michael Moore bursts into the offices of a multinational corporation, film crew in tow, to tackle that company’s appalling record in human rights—and then just hassles the receptionist, instead.

  If you don’t like the black films that are being made, attack the power—the white studios, backers, and distributors—not the few black artists out there breaking their balls to get something bold and beautiful made.

  Here’s a story I found, a couple of months ago, that encapsulates the whole 12 Years a Slave affair. Danny Glover—star of the Lethal Weapon films—has spent thirty years trying to make a film about the Haitian revolution. The Haitian revolution—the only slave colony in the world that overthrew its slave masters to form its own government. This is basically as if, in the Second World War, there had been a concentration camp where the prisoners overthrew the guards—and then went on to rule Germany. It’s one of the all-time great pitches.

  And yet this film still hasn’t been made—despite, at one point, Glover assembling a cast that included Wesley Snipes, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Angela Bassett, and Mos Def. Studios could not imagine someone making a film about the first ever black revolution—no matter how righteous a subject it might be. But what’s the one thing that might, now, finally get this film made? That the imperfect conversation-starting 12 Years a Slave made $158 million, and won Best Picture, at the Oscars. Steve McQueen has started a new conversation. He’s opened a new mark
et. That is more—more—more—than enough for one film to do.

  New York Will Save Us

  I am not a naysayer. I say “Nay!” to naysayers. I believe in giddy, deluded, intoxicated optimism, because that is the fuel that will keep you going long after anger, and righteousness, and fear have burned out. I look everywhere for things to make me optimistic—and Manhattan is probably the biggest of them all.

  I didn’t want to go to New York. I’m tired, and still undergoing a small melancholy about not seeing any birds in my garden this summer—at least, not enough for a party, or a bustle in the hedgerows.

  I wanted to go to Wales, and marinade in soft drizzle, and do “some nature”: look at red kites through binoculars, wear a Gore-Tex anorak, and sit on some limestone, drinking tea from a thermos. If I could order that day from Argos, that’s the one I would order. Wales. Where nature is not slowly dying. Where my anxiety about a forthcoming environmental apocalypse can be ignored, for a while.

  But, instead: New York. Manhattan. Steel. Glass. Planes. Gotham. No nature at all—unless one counts one of those miserable, cancer-footed pigeons eating vomit next to a man dressed as a Minion in Times Square. This is where we are. New York.

  And, of course, despite my melancholy, I’m not going to waste this city. That would be titanic ingratitude. Never look a gift New York in the mouth. Bad pigeons or not, New York is like yellow shoes, or sunshine, or Bowie—it goes with everything. It’s never wrong. When life gives you New York, make New York–ade.

  On the first day, walking through Greenwich Village as the children take pictures of everything—the fire hydrants, the homeless man with no nose (“Girls—don’t take pictures of the homeless man with no nose”)—I remember that, when I first came here—seventeen, with a band, drunk, astonished—I became convinced that New York was a feeling, more than anything else. You know “The Moment”? When the fire catches, or the chorus lifts, or the first cocktail hits your nervous system? The short, hot crescendo of the day? Somehow, Manhattan’s electrical circuit board streets have conspired to break all the rules of time, and make the island live in a state of permanent crescendo. It’s always having “The Moment.” It’s always climaxing.