Caitlin Moran apologises that she has inherited her table-talk style from her Irish-Liverpudlian dad, a session musician, full of “too-much-acid 1960s paranoia”, father of eight, who used to lay claim to being the only hippy in Wolverhampton . “He would either be completely silent for days working on something, or he would launch into an enormous monologue for four hours,” she says. “I think it comes from having a druggy background, one thing always leads to another and another. I am still trying to learn how to have conversations. In our family, we would all just be monologuing at each other at the same time at dinner. In big families, you learn to listen and talk at the same time. And also to eat very quickly. If you have something on your plate, it’s only a matter of time before a fork will come over your shoulder: ‘Are you not eating that sausage?’ and it’s gone. As a result, I can swallow a sausage whole like a snake and digest it later. Or you lick everything first, so people can’t take it. You’re lucky, I have only recently learned to stop doing that.”
We’re sitting in a dark corner of the Crouch End institution Banner’s, the perfect north London, neighbourhood, all-day cafe, bar, restaurant; noisy and cosy, with its chintzy light fittings, old Dylan posters and road-trip flavours of Cartagena and Kathmandu. Moran lives up the hill. She’s nursing a cold – “I’m afraid I’m gargling phlegm” –, so she orders English breakfast tea “in the biggest possible mug you have” and chicken curry, “not the Cambodian one, old school, saffron rice”; I find myself fixing on the beetroot curry special and beer. And then she’s off again, one thought sparking six others. It’s not that she is impolite – she’s quite the opposite, charming, generous, funny – it’s just that, when you chip in with a slow-cooked observation or a half-cocked question, she’s not only all ears, she’s hardly able to contain the next argument and the one after that.
She writes that way too. Since Moran first started on Melody Maker when she was 16, nearly 25 years ago, every day has been a deadline. “At the moment, I have to write 13,000 words minimum every week,” she says, bright-eyed. “Minimum. I am writing two films and a new novel, and I have two columns a week to do for the Times. And the second series of the sitcom I write with my sister is just done. The more you write, the easier it gets. For a bit, I was writing just one column and I would spend three days writing 800 fucking words.” She has only experienced writer’s block once, for three hours, two decades ago, when she had to write up two versions of the same gig review for different papers. Impossible. Other than that, she can hardly wait to get to her desk. She’s grateful for the chance to be out now, though. Every time she goes through the front door, she says, “My kids say it’s as if I’ve been in a coma since the 1970s, I’m marvelling at the blossom, it’s like Awakenings.” On the way, she’s picked up some dry cleaning she dropped off in November.
Curries, chicken and beetroot, arrive. Moran orders more tea. We are here to talk about her new book, Moranifesto. It’s a sequel of sorts to her bestselling How to Be a Woman of a few years ago, but more about politics in general. A collection of recent columns and pieces, “part attempt to understand 21st-century society, part getting drunk with Benedict Cumberbatch”, framed by a call to arms to change the broken system.
“I thought Russell Brand’s Revolution was a brilliant idea,” she says. “People suddenly felt they could talk about politics, particularly young working-class people. Then the book came out and actually there were no ideas in it. So I just wanted to do something where I put a few ideas on the table.”
The ideas are collected up in a proper manifesto at the end. It argues for crowdsourced policies, for maximum diversity, for finding ways to not waste a single neuron of human ingenuity. It argues for an end to first-past-the-post tribalism. “We need loads more parties. Two based on stuff that was happening a hundred years ago isn’t enough. If you were to redesign parliament, the only things you would keep are the big clock and the subsidised bar.”
A lot of it, she believes, rests on the need to change the way we argue. The internet has opened up discourse, but it has opened it up to name-calling and manufactured outrage. “An emotion is triggered. I have seen so many shitty things written about Gloria Steinem, just because she said a mild joke about Bernie Sanders. People wade into battle. All the ways we communicate have been designed by young men. The options are binary: like or don’t like. There should also be a ‘can we step back and contextualise this please?’ button. I think online chat should take the rules of improvisational comedy, which is you never say no, you go with things: if somebody says, ‘We’re in a toy shop!’, you say, ‘Yes, and we are selling puppets!’, you don’t say, ‘Actually, we are not in a fucking toyshop!’”
Moran’s heroes are pop stars and novelists, the people who formed her in her home-schooled, self-taught teens. She cries briefly when I mention the couple of pieces she wrote about David Bowie in the book. She misses the days when “cool was more powerful than wealth”.
“Those aspects of working-class culture are shut down – photography, film, music, journalism are now all the stuff we give away for free. Is that deliberate? You end up with The X Factor, a show about the very, very least interesting bit of pop music: how to be an A&R man.”
“We have started making films about businessmen! Steve Jobs or whoever. We live in a country now where there is hardly anyone you can point to and say: there is the working-class culture, there are the working-class directors and writers.”
What’s is her next film script about?
“It’s a true story about a woman called Julie D’Aubigny, a cross-dressing, bisexual opera star who was also the best swordswoman in France. By day she was Beyoncé, but by night she was like a feminist avenger. This is like 1690. If any of the girls in the cast were slighted by a man, she would dress up like boy and challenge him to a duel. She was a mad drinker, gambler, shagger …”
Does Moran’s writing all come from the same place?
“Everything I do is sort of about trying to increase the lexicon,” she says. “I grew up without school but everything I loved in books and films and TV were like messages from people with other backgrounds like mine. Messages about how to live …”
And how to write?
“Yes! They were like a breadcrumb trail out through the forest. Artists and writers open doors, it’s like: come in here! That is what Bowie did: ‘give me your hand!’ If you are off a council estate, if you are a girl, if you are of colour, if you are trans, it still often feels as though you are not invited. The role of culture is to say you are. We need all the brains on board. So that’s my manifesto. To try to clear a space where we are going to be kind and polite and about joy. Don’t complain, build an alternative. And don’t believe this can be done in the future or in some non-existent next life. This is it, now. Your only chance.”
Has she inherited her dad’s paranoia?
“I’m aware of it,” she says with her children’s storybook grin. “I find it amazing all people don’t have a plan for the apocalypse. I want to reject the mad old bastard’s paranoia, but he wasn’t wrong really. My dad would say, when we get the nuclear warning we will get in the Volkswagen caravanette and drive to Wales. We will have ten minutes to pack, so always have in your mind what you are going to take. Packing is important when you have eight kids. I haven’t had to be that specific because I only have two.”
Moran pulls out her phone, shows me scarily funny pictures she has just had done for the serialisation of her book: of herself dressed up as Margaret Thatcher, as a gender-fluid Winston Churchill, “half statesman, half insurance dog”, as a thin-lipped Nicola Sturgeon and – most alarming of all – a wispy-bearded Jeremy Corbyn. Politics seems so dated, she says, just now. “It’s like we are stuck with skiffle. And I am waiting for the Beatles to arrive.” And then she dashes off with her dry cleaning to write a column, be there when her daughters come in from school, and have another 800-word crack at changing the world.
Moranifesto is out now (Ebury, £18.99). Click here to buy a copy from Guardian Bookshop for £14.99
