There’s a whole slew of books like this being published at the moment, which suggests, weirdly, that adult women are frantic for advice on how to be a member of their own gender. The genre is piggybacking off the success of Camilla Morton’s 2005 bestseller How to Walk in High Heels, which gave celebrity tips on topics from poaching an egg to changing atyre.Publishers are also aware that The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls (GBGBFG) recently hit the top of the bestseller lists, and that there’s still a rich seam to be mined once you move out of childhood into adolescence and beyond. Hence the onslaught of manuals by women who would no doubt describe themselves as “sassy” and who don’t find the idea of telling people how to live just like them either embarrassing or even a tiny bit hilarious.

Lucy Mangan’s book is, mercifully, not like that. It is intelligent, wonderfully written and extremely funny. The title is completely misleading – a precocious 15-year-old might have a blast reading it, but I’m guessing it’s aimed more at women in their late twenties to early thirties, since it covers everything from surviving playgroup to sexual harassment and pregnancy, and its tone is too spiky and knowing for the average 12-year-old. It’s certainly not the GBGBFG. Here is Mangan on skipping: “The two girls holding the rope have all the power. If they take a dislike to the girl in the middle, they can increase the rate of turning to beyond what they know she can cope with and bring her crashing down in more ways than one. The rope that eventually entangles the skipper’s feet is a mirror of the creepers of humiliation that are choking her dreams of social acceptance to death.” And on flower-pressing, as recommended by the GBGBFG: “A favourite occupation of young Victorian ladies. They needed blotting paper, some heavy books and TB.” A description follows. (“Put another sheet of blotting paper on top of your stupid flower.” Result: “After a month or so, remove the books and blotting paper and take out your flower. Disappointing, isn’t it? Just be grateful you’re not coughing up blood.”) Either this kind of thing amuses you or it doesn’t – I found myself amused in the extreme (and almost incapacitated by the snog/bogey story on page 156). Mangan is lethally accurate in her dismantling of the feminine, but manages the nifty trick of not sounding overly smartarsey, even when she is, for instance, describing The Feminist Mother (“it’s disconcerting to be confronted by a five-year-old pointing at her knickers and saying proudly, ‘that’s my vagina’”).

I have one complaint – she overdoes it slightly on the “spastic” jokes, which are, to most people, no longer funny in any context. “Cabbage Patch dolls were . . . the ugliest thing ever invented,” she writes. “They looked like they had a fatal syndrome of some kind. No wonder they were all up for adoption.” I am possibly oversensitive, but the joy of the book – and it is a joyous book – died when I read that sentence: it was like hearing a friend suddenly announcing that the BNP has some sound policies. I made myself pick it up again, and I’m glad I did, otherwise I would have missed out on the brilliant chapter on diet and exercise (two rules, she concludes: “1) if you like it, don’t eat it; 2) if you don’t like doing it, do it”). The book is nostalgic without being sentimental, breezily clever in its analyses and the perfect thing to read in the bath. Buy it for your girlfriend, who will thank you profusely, but not for your sensitive flower of a preteen daughter, because she’ll lock herself in her room gibbering with terror and never leave the house again.

Hopscotch and handbags: The Essential Guide to Being a Girl by Lucy Mangan ~
Headline Review £12.99 pp304
Buy the book here at the offer price of £11.69 (inc p&p)

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