How I built a girl

Writer and feminist icon Caitlin Moran is well acquainted with her younger self, having based How to Build a Girl on her own story of leaving her overcrowded family home in Wolverhampton at 16 for a glamorous career in music journalism. In as candid a Letter to My Younger Self interview as you’ll read, she dives into how she finally found her own voice and her own mind.

Also inside:

• Forty years after hitting the big screen, Flash Gordon is back to save every one of us. Star of the spangled trousers Sam J Jones says that he’s up for a return, having spent the past decades honing his hero skills as a security guard in some of the world’s trouble spots
• What is Antifa? Sam Delaney tracks down historian Mark Bray, who wrote the book on anti-fascism
• Booker-nominated author Ali Smith describes why she decided to write a quartet of novels at speed and in real time to chart our, erm, eventful world since 2016
• More on the Ride Out Recession Alliance – our campaign to make sure the estimated 500,000 people at risk of homelessness due to the pandemic are able to surf the crashing waves of economic uncertainty
• Big Issue vendor Mark Cotterill says he’s glad to be back on his pitch after months of lockdown

All this and more only in this week’s Big Issue!

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