Caitlin easily earns her keep

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The trouble with fame, as JK Rowling would no doubt confirm, is its interminable and generally rather pernicious half-life.

Gratifying though it must certainly be to create something that captures the imagination of millions of readers, there is a shadow to all that adulation, and it falls heavily over the book after the one (or in Rowling’s case, the seven) that people adored.

Caitlin Moran was already well known as an award-winning columnist before she published her vastly successful user’s guide to the female condition, How to be a Woman. But that book elevated her to an entirely different level of celebrity, and set up a degree of expectation for its successor that must be daunting, even for a writer as experienced as Moran, who began her journalistic career in her mid-teens.

But the advantage of being an author who is also a journalist is that you have a readymade archive of material, just begging to be recycled. An anthology of occasional journalism involves a minimum of extra work, has a virtuous air of thriftiness, and keeps your name in the public eye while you brood about your Next Great Work.

The title of Moran’s second book, Moranthology, gives a strong clue as to its contents, and while her publisher’s blurb carefully avoids the words “old columns”, the woman herself is refreshingly upfront about the nature of her enterprise, which she describes as “the nearest I will ever get to releasing The Beatles Blue Album, or The Beatles Red Album” (the endearing combination of hubris and self-depreciation is entirely characteristic).

Unless you are a Nazi, an internet troll or Lola from the ineffable Charlie and Lola series of children’s books (“that crayoned harpy must die”), this anthology is, Moran writes, “a manifesto for joy”. When she landed a job as a newspaper columnist at the age of 19, “I determined to use the opportunity to racket around as many exhilarating things as possible”.

Among the opportunities for exhilaration revisited in her collection are interviews with Keith Richards, Lady Gaga and Paul McCartney, an account of how a squirrel with giant testicles became the star of BBC2’s The Great British Bake Off, and a defence of Rupert Murdoch’s paywall (the latter is one of a fairly small number of pieces that don’t really earn their keep).

The artist Paul Klee described the act of drawing as “taking a line for a walk”. At its best, writing a column involves taking a thought for a walk, and it is an exercise at which Moran excels. The most engaging pieces in this collection are the most autobiographical. These include, oddly enough, her interviews, in which she is a powerful presence (her spirited account of going out on the lash with Lady Gaga almost justifies the shocking price of this volume).

There is inevitably a certain air of marking time about any volume of collected journalism but Moranthology contains enough of Moran’s charm and originality to keep her readers happy until her next new book.

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