Caitlin Moran novel How to Build a Girl reinvented as film adaptation

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/11/caitlin-moran-movie-how-to-build-a-girl

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Caitlin Moran’s semi-autobiographical novel How to Build a Girl, about a Wolverhampton teenager who decamps to London and a new life as a libidinous music critic, is coming to the big screen, reports Variety.

Production company Monumental Pictures has picked up the film rights to the novel, which won excellent reviews and has sold more than half a million copies in more than 16 countries. Moran will adapt her own book alongside Scottish screenwriter and novelist John Niven. The film also has financial backing from Film4.

How to Build a Girl centres on 14-year-old Johanna Morrigan, who lives with her impoverished and eccentric family in a Wolverhampton council house until she escapes to London in the early 1990s to work in the music press. There, she reinvents herself as the loquacious, hard-drinking “lady sex adventurer” Dolly Wilde.

The storyline mirrors Moran’s own journey, which saw her win the Observer’s Young Reporter of the Year prize at the age of 15 and launch a career as a music journalist for Melody Maker.

“Caitlin Moran is the wittiest writer on the planet and her creation Johanna Morrigan stands alongside Elizabeth Bennet and Bridget Jones as one of the great female literary icons,” said Monumental’s Debra Hayward. “We want to make commercial movies and television with strong female characters.”

Moran’s other books include the acclaimed memoir How to Be a Woman and the Moranthology collection. How to Build a Girl, which was described by the Observer’s Barbara Ellen as “an entertaining read, with Moran in fine voice – hilarious, wild, imaginative and highly valuable” last July, is the first novel in a planned trilogy.