More Than a Woman

The latest book by Moran opens with a hilarious imagined conversation today’s Moran would have had with herself 10 years ago, when she completed How To Be a Woman, ostensibly signaling that her original definition of what it meant to be a woman felt complex, when in fact it failed to accommodate who she would become. With that in mind, she’s written an addition of sorts—almost, as the hour-by-hour chapter structure suggests, a day in her life. She examines gaps between ideals and realities, from her daily to-do lists and the order she hopes they provide, to the chaotic mess of midnight tweets and more personal struggles that show how precariously we can cling to theories or values even as we see our real lives taking their own shape, often far from what we hoped to create. But it’s in her descriptions of parenting that Moran is at her rawest and most vulnerable, as she emphasizes how hard it is to realize we can’t save others (we can hardly keep ourselves afloat, after all) while also revealing that it’s enough to realize we need to make changes when (not if) we fail.