Moranthology

August 22, 2016
Moran, a novelist and career pop culture critic, doesn’t consider herself one of the “professional political people,” but emboldened by the success of her 2011 book How to Be a Woman—a feminist manifesto, of sorts—she’s taken on even more tough topics, including political ones, in this collection of her columns from the Times of London. The collection is organized loosely into themes such as “change” and “arguing on the Internet,” with new introductions that tie everything together. Moran touches on a wide array of topics, including Daft Punk’s hit song “Get Lucky,” Hillary Clinton, social media, class differences, and abortion. Moran’s endless sense of humor, enthusiasm for punching upward, and liberal use of the word you makes reading the collection like hanging out with a loud and chatty friend (“WHERE ARE THE SEXY BITS?” she demands of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, in an essay on the importance of reading). Readers don’t have to be interested in or knowledgeable about everything she references (such as U.K. politics) to have fun with Moran, but they do need a silly sense of humor.