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Published in Sunday Life, 7 August 2011. Copyright Rachel Hills 2011.

She left school at 11 and wrote her first novel aged 14, but, unlike many child prodigies, Caitlin Moran has avoided burnout and is giving the world another good shake with her latest book, How To Be a Woman. By Rachel Hills.

Where most teenagers celebrate their 13th birthdays with a big slice of cake, Caitlin Moran celebrated hers with a cheese baguette, sexual harassment from some neighbourhood thugs and a newly minted – as she puts it – “big pair of tits”. It was not, you might say, the most welcoming entrance into womanhood.

Twenty-three years later, Moran, 36, is the toast of the town, her cheeky grin near ubiquitous on the advertising on London’s Underground. On the afternoon of our interview, she has just come from a meeting with her agent to discuss the film rights to her new book, How to Be a Woman. Afterwards, she will meet with Loveleen Tandan, co-director of the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire. She has more than 100,000 followers on Twitter. Germaine Greer won’t stop singing her praises.

But back in the late 1980s, Moran didn’t know much about being a woman at all. When she got her first period at 13, it lasted three months. Believing she was only allowed to ask her mother one question on the matter – Moran chose “Will it hurt?” – she assumed this to be normal. When she started sprouting pubic hairs, the whole family was given the memo (her mother screamed, “Is that pubes I can see?” when Moran was changing into her pyjamas in the lounge room one evening). The next day, she shaved them off, “so that the most interesting thing to look at in the front room will be, once again, the television”.

It’s fair to say that adolescence was not the best of times for Moran. “The transformation of my body from something that does little more than poo and do jigsaws into a magical department store that will, one day, vend babies [took] up nearly all my time and worry,” she writes. So it seemed only natural that, as a grown-up with a laptop, a striking sense of style (“If I look like I’ve stepped out of the Amazon rainforest, I’m doing well,” she quips of her yellow polka-dot dress and leopard-print bag), and a job as a columnist for UK newspaper The Times, she would pen a guide for traversing the challenges of womanhood – not just through puberty, but beyond.

How to Be a Woman mixes memoir and feminist polemic, covering everything from masturbation and clotty periods to the wedding industry, pornography, abortion and descriptions of the births of her two children that are alternately excruciating and uplifting. Moran, its author, is one part high school misfit, two parts feisty older sister and one part that funny, fearless girl in the playground everyone secretly wants to be. As one reviewer put it, the book might more accurately be titled How to Be Caitlin Moran.

Moran says this positioning was intentional, explaining that she wanted the book to appeal to girls and women who “don’t read books, but who read magazines instead”.

“One of my terrible weaknesses is that I cannot make an argument where I argue right from wrong,” she says with typically self-deprecating humour. “What I can do is frame what I think to be right as being ‘cool’, and what I think to be shit as ‘not cool’.”

Rather than grounding her arguments in statistics and philosophy, Moran trades in personal experience and – importantly – humour. If there is to be a fifth wave of feminism, she writes, “I would hope the main thing that distinguishes it from all that came before is that women counter the awkwardness, disconnect and bullshit of being a modern woman not by shouting at it, internalising it or squabbling about it – but by simply pointing at it, and going, ‘Ha!’ instead.”

And there is a lot that deserves to be laughed at. Brazilian waxes, for instance, which Moran likens to a “fanny tax”. Or designer shoes, “bought as a down payment on a new life I had seen in a magazine, and subsequently thought I would attain, now that I had the right shoes”.

“It has got to the point where just being an intelligent, rational woman who doesn’t buy into these constructs makes women feel vulnerable,” she says. “It makes us feel weird. But I’m saying, no, you should feel normal for thinking like that. Brazilians and high heels are costing you money and they hurt! Why would you want to engage with them?”

Some commentators chalk up the popularity of such phenomena over the past couple of decades to a failure of feminism, but Moran disagrees. “I see it as a failure of popular culture,” she says. “You don’t see real women in films or sitcoms. You don’t see real women being referenced in the pop industry.”

When Moran speaks of “real women”, she is not just talking about more diverse representations of women’s bodies; she’s interested in the waywomen’s experiences and relationships are represented as well. Of the box-office smash Bridesmaids, she remarks, “Given that I’ve seen planets explode and blue people living in a magic tree, the fact that two women having a realistic conversation about sex in a cafe is considered revolutionary is just pathetic.”

Moran grew up in a council flat in Wolverhampton, the eldest of eight siblings. She left school at the age of 11 – ostensibly to be homeschooled, but in reality educating herself in the local library. “I have a vastly specialised knowledge,” she told The Independent back in 1994, shortly after her 19th birthday. “Ask me anything about Satanism. I know how to bleed-ice a cake, but I’m shite at mathematics.”

Moran’s family didn’t have much money – hence the cheese birthday baguette – so she wrote her first novel, The Chronicles of Narmo, when she was 14 to help them out, convinced that some nefarious activity or another on her part had run them into debt. The book was published when she was 16. Soon after, Moran moved to London, writing for the legendary British music publication Melody Maker. At 17, she was writing for The Observer and by 18 she was hosting her own late-night television show and penning a column for The Times.

On the outside, Moran’s life appeared thoroughly glamorous. She was a teenage TV star, a writing prodigy “about 10 years ahead of her contemporaries”, The Independent put it at the time. She was one half of a London glamour couple, dating an “insanely talented, very beautiful … boy in a band”. She would wake up at 2pm and go to bed at dawn. But Moran was not happy. She hated doing television, she tells me, quitting after two years. The beautiful boy in a band was verbally and emotionally abusive. Being famous, she quickly discovered, “by and large [consisted] of drunk people coming up to you at gigs, saying, ‘You’re shit!’ and walking away again”.

These days, Moran lives a much quieter life. “I see my friends, and I have parties at my house where we just get drunk,” she says, “but I don’t have any memberships to any clubs or really go out. I order all my clothes online from Topshop.” For the most part, “kids and work” are the order of the day.

In 2009, Moran told friend and songwriter Martin Carr, “I’m turning out pissing 5000 words a week for Rupert Murdoch – I haven’t got time to menstruate, let alone write a book.” And yet, write a book she did – and in just five months at that. “It was absolutely knackering,” she recalls. “One weekend I had to write 24,000 words. It was harsh, but I love it.”

So, why feminism? Part of it the problem, says Moran, is that we just don’t agree on what it means any more. “I understand what I mean by feminism, and all my girlfriends – my girl Vikings – understand it. But if you say it to someone like a man or a younger person, they wouldn’t really understand what you meant.” The other problem, she argues, is that women’s experiences still aren’t talked about in the same way that men’s are.

This might seem a bit rich in an age in which women dominate magazine covers and pop music (if not business, politics or film), and in which the feminist blogosphere has made it easier than ever for women to be politically engaged. But Moran is persuasive. “Normal is still what men do. Women’s interests and experiences are still considered a special case. What I want to do is expand the definition of normal to include what women do.

“You bet your bottom dollar that if men could have abortions, it would be everywhere,” she continues. “It would not even be seen as an issue. It just seems insane that the issues I talk about in the book reflect 50 per cent of the world population’s experience and I’m getting 200 Twitter messages from people a day saying, you know, ‘I find it really liberating to read that someone else has clotty periods, too.’ ”

Moran’s tales of clotty periods serve a bigger political purpose. How to Be a Woman may tell the story of the past 20 years of Moran’s life, but it’s also a call to arms. Moran doesn’t just want women’s stories to take a bigger place on the stage, she also wants women to take back the “F” word. With force. “I want to reclaim the phrase ‘strident feminist’ in the same way the black community has reclaimed the word ‘nigger’,” she writes. “ ‘Go, my strident feminist! You work that male/female dialectic dichotomy,’ I will shout at my friends in bars, while everyone nods at how edgy and real we are.”

Why do labels matter? Isn’t it enough to just take on the ideas? “Saying, ‘I’m a feminist’ is just the quickest, shortest way of saying, ‘Get out of my face. I am not going to take your bullshit,’ ” Moran retorts.

One of Moran’s heroes is Lady Gaga, and an interview with the pop star won her a British Press Award this year. She admires the way the singer has “cleared a space where we can just discuss things, where the freaks can come and chat and feel safe” – and says she would like to achieve something similar with How to Be a Woman.

“What I really hope is that there’ll be another 50 books,” she says. “How to Really Be a Woman. How to Totally Be a Woman. How to Actually Be a Woman. Because there isn’t a space like that in popular culture. If you buy a women’s magazine, it tells you, ‘Here is a problem and here’s how you can fix it.’ ” That’s why How to Be a Woman has resonated with people, says Moran, “because there was a massive glaring lack of discussion about women’s experiences”.

Yet as a veteran of the media cycle, Moran is also conscious that good times come and go. She likens her current success to the monorail in an episode of The Simpsons in which the characters get caught up in hype around a new transport system. “This week I’m the monorail. I’m sure next week the money will disappear, but for now it’s all free champagne and having smoke blown up your arse.”