The 11 men who changed my life (for better or worse)

When What About Men? came out last year, among the good reviews and the No 1 chart position and the lovely comments from people at the live shows, there was a notable, contrasting undercurrent from some ― let’s call them “sour” — people. The gist of it seemed to be — as far as I could tell: as with all authors, I absorb all negative feedback by dwelling on a single word, then sobbing until my eyes swell up — a rather peevish inquiry. Thus: “Why would a woman write a book about men? What can a woman know about men? The world of women and the world of men are very, very different. You can’t have some… titty tourist drawing up the maps of Terra Knackers.”

To which, all I can say is… are they different worlds? Are women truly alien in the world of men? Are men truly alien in the world of women? Although we can all think of ― and, indeed, endlessly debate ― ways in which our experiences are totally different, in the end we do all kind of… live together. We all hang out a lot. Even the most “manly”, “all about the lads” dude will have spent a lot of time with women ― his mother, sisters, lovers, friends, colleagues, bosses. He will have woozily wept, as any human would, in the back of a minicab at 1am to Barbra Streisand’s Woman in Love.

And similarly, even the most feminist, Team Tits, “here for my girls” chick will have had her life formed ― for better or for worse ― by the men she meets from the cradle to the grave. Or even just “from the hairdresser’s to the bar”.

• What About Men by Caitlin Moran review ― eavesdropping on women’s ‘boy talk’
• I wrote a book about men’s problems. Then came the backlash

Everyone’s life is a story of the people they met who changed them: the things they learnt from them, the way they reacted to them. Distant heroes that inspired you. That thing someone said to you 30 years ago that you still think of every day ― even though, when you finally mention it to them, they have no recollection of it at all. A cardigan, a small scar, a lingering fondness for Van Morrison, two children ― you never know what pivotal thing someone’s going to give you.

Here, then, are the 11 men who changed my life. Because, in the end, men and women make each other. Over and over and over. That’s what we do.

The Brutal Realist

At the time, it felt very unfair. “This is not how I should be parented!” I would say to myself from a position of indignant knowledge – having recently read Dr Miriam Stoppard’s Complete Baby and Child Care. Or, on the more visceral days, my response would be, “This is unfair! I’m just a child!” On the most intense days of all, I would just cry hysterically. Which he found annoying. Which would make me cry even more.

My father had been raised in absolute poverty ― his mother bombed out of five houses in Swansea and Liverpool during the war. Seven children and a husband at war; rats; and relying on handouts from the Catholic Church for food.

By 15, my father had left ― joined a band and surfed the post-Beatles rock’n’roll gold rush in Germany. The Star Club, the Reeperbahn. The band failed, he was diagnosed with arthritis ― a death knell for a drummer ― and he ended up in a council house in Wolverhampton in pain, on benefits and ready to go Full Yoda on any of his eight children’s ambitions. Not lovely, cuddly Yoda, when he whispers, “Feel the Force, Luke.” The Yoda that gets on Luke’s back and hits him with a stick. Maybe you need both Yodas. I didn’t think so at the time.

“You say you want to be a writer? Well, start f***ing writing!” my father would say when I revealed my most tender, girlish dreams. To live in London and earn my crust by way of pen or quill.

“But I’m… 11,” I would say, lip already wobbling. “Nothing’s happened to me. I don’t have anything to write about.”

“If you’re a writer, you should be able to write about… anything. You should be able to write 1,000 words about [and here he looked around the room] a lightbulb. Just ― f*** off and start writing.”

At the time ― and in my head only ― I would argue back at him. “Writing isn’t like that. You wouldn’t know ― you just read the novels of Sven Hassel, which is poor literature. I read the Brontës, which is great literature. And also Dr Miriam Stoppard’s Complete Baby and Child Care, which says a child’s ambitions should be nurtured in ‘an atmosphere of gentle love and support’. Not this, ‘F*** off.’ ”

• Read more from Caitlin Moran

But ultimately, of course, he was right. If you want to be a writer, the only advice is brutal: start writing. And, yes, you should be able to write about anything ― find an angle or a question or the fun in every single thing on earth. These days, I could absolutely write 1,000 words on lightbulbs. The vibe difference between a bayonet ― a piratical, rakish, one twist and you’re done ― and the steady as she goes diligence of the screw-in. You shag a bayonet, but you marry a screw-in. And that’s before we address Lightbulb Inflation and this recent, mad trend towards bulbs the size of footballs. Are we going to keep embiggening them until we have a bulb the size of the sun? What are you trying to prove?

Start writing. Write about everything. At some point, a writer has to have this ruthless driving voice in their head. My father’s gift was to give me his. Shouting away inside. By the time I was 13, I was writing my first book. The main character was an irascible father, prone to outbursts of rage. Look around the room. Write what you see. Write about the light you see by.

The One Who Wanted To Share The Things That Made Him Happy

A man on Hilston Avenue kept budgies ― blue, pink, yellow, purple; the colours of aquilegias ― in a big cage in his back garden, which backed onto the high-walled alleyway. Obviously, every child in the neighbourhood was desperate to see the budgies ― their joyful chirrups from behind the wall seemed directed at us.

“Come and look! Look at the beautiful local bird zoo!”

Many children fell from great heights in their attempts to climb to the top of the alleyway wall to see them.

One day, we walked down the alleyway and saw that the Budgie Man had drilled out a single brick in that wall. So we could see in.

The hole was at the exact height of an eight-year-old’s eyes.

He wanted to show us the things he loved.

The One Who Made Being A Grown-Up Look Fun

Rik Mayall. On the TV. Most grown-up men on TV were serious ― Michael Buerk looking stricken in a war zone. Nick Ross insisting, “Sleep well ― don’t have nightmares,” after unpacking a cavalcade of terrifying murders on Crimewatch.

Rik Mayall was… a man-child. Old enough to drive a car but still young enough to sulk about a sub-optimal birthday; or wrestle comedy partner Ade Edmondson to the floor; or be amused by his own bon mots. His face kept exploding with how amusing he found himself ― which seemed like a great existence to be having. I couldn’t work out if I wanted to marry him or be him. I felt he would want me to want both.

• What happened when I met Ade Edmondson, my idol

For Comic Relief 1986, he leapt onto the stage ― absolutely addled with adrenaline and applause ― pulled his pants up over his trousers and sang a bastardised version of Do You Love Me? in a hysterical screech.

“Would you like to see my bottom? Would you really like to see my bottom?” he tempted.

Unbeknown to me, I was absorbing this as the primary lesson in my future courting style.

The One With The Sex Tip

“Never leave a hand idle.”

I was 18 and he claimed he was 26 ― years later, we found out he was actually 36, which explained why he kept constantly brushing his fringe over his forehead: wrinkles ― and he had clearly cast himself as my sexual tutor.

“Eh?” I said.

“Your hands ― always make sure they’re both doing something. In bed. There’s no point just having one hand lounging around doing nothing. Keep them both busy.”

He meant on him, obviously: he craved some manner of erotic octopus and I was the chick with two hands he could make do with.

Even though, ironically, he was lazy in bed ― in our relationship, he was the idle hand, I the more useful one ― this did prove, over the years, to be pretty good advice. If you’ve constantly got loads of business on the juggle, it adds to a vibe of “overwhelming sexual onslaught” that is often the hallmark of a good night in.

And it’s advice that has proved surprisingly transferable: these days, I’m most likely to invoke it when one of the kids is going upstairs.

“Never leave a hand idle,” I shout as I hear their feet hit the first step. “Take that washing up with you.”

Thanks, terrible boyfriend.

But who would make a good boyfriend?

The One In The Greatest Ever One-Frame Depiction Of Manhood

I mean, there’s Yesterday, Helter Skelter, Let Me Roll It and the bassline to Paperback Writer ― oh my word, the bassline to Paperback Writer! ― but, really, if it comes down to it, the greatest effect Paul McCartney ever had on me was a photo: beardy Beatle keeping his baby safe, like an egg. Could have been off being a shag-bag rock Viking crusted to the eyebrows on cocaine ― but preferred to pop a baby in his coat and go for a nice walk.

As soon as I saw this picture, in 1994, I knew: this was the kind of man I had to go and find. A man who had this picture on his wall too.

The One Who Said Something Simple

“You’re clever,” he said. He was my boss.

I was 27. No one had said it to me before.

I was amazed by how amazed I felt about this. I decided to try to make it true.

I also wanted to make this opinion of me have as much impact as the last opinion of me I’d been given, “You walk like a penguin,” by a 25-year-old soon to be ex-boyfriend from Aylesbury.

That had seen me spend five years watching my gait in shop window reflections and trying to alter it ― until I finally reached resolution in Camden, when a man ran up to me and asked if he could take my picture.

“Why, of course,” I said ― this man was clearly deeply and instantly in love with me. How adorable. He was smitten.

“It’s just, I’m a podiatrist and you have the most extreme example of over-pronation I’ve ever seen,” he continued. “I must show my students.”

I looked blank.

“You have incredibly weak ankles,” he explained.

Two weeks later, he was making me orthotic insoles. He was not my future husband after all. But he did stop me walking like a penguin.

The One Who Removed Fear

Imagine it like a lonely hearts ad. “27-yr-old woman, previously had a birth experience so awful she genuinely thought she was going to die, seeks obstetrician for mutually rewarding second labour.”

He was a renowned natural birth expert. I was renowned ― to me ― for not being a natural birth expert. My last attempt had seen a three-day labour end in an emergency c-section, permanent nerve damage and PTSD.

“Buy yourself a peony,” he said at our first appointment. “A peony in bud. Watch it open, petal by petal. That’s what will happen to your cervix when you are in labour. It will help to remember it. You need to know what’s happening in your body. Birth is an active event.”

This was not the advice I had been expecting. But then, I don’t know what advice I was expecting. I think I was hoping for, “For the private medical fees you are paying me, I will have this baby for you. You won’t feel a thing!”

But how do you prepare a woman to open her cervix and heft out something the size of a bread bin? A peony is as good as any place to start. I bought one. I observed it. I kept fit, as he insisted. No “eating a whole Christmas pudding for breakfast” this time around. I listened to the hypno-birthing tapes he gave me, which explained each stage of what would happen to my body rather than the imaginary body of some other woman who I think, all along, I’d hoped would do the birthing for me.

And when the time came, I visualised the peony, climbed into the birthing tub and ― it worked! This baby slipped out like a hot, hairy eel even as I cried, “That was easy. Why does everyone make such a fuss?” And I marvelled that a man ― a man in his sixties, with no cervix at all ― could tell a twentysomething woman how to operate hers.

Although the main thing, if I’m honest ― when it comes down to it ― is that he had tiny, tiny hands that, when the time came, could just slip inside and pull that baby out.

The Teacher

He didn’t look like a teacher when he turned up. He was holding a bottle of champagne and was already drunk, as was I, and we spent the entire party sitting in the garden being volubly quite vile to each other. It was one of those three-times-in-your-life moments where you meet someone and know immediately that you are beyond friends: you are a new family. A chosen brother and sister.

At that age ― 32 ― I had a big problem, in that I could never ask anyone for help. I would rather die, etc. What kind of idiot could not solve every single problem, for the entire span of their lives, without even mentioning it to others? Not this proud fool: I was an entirely sealed and self-sustaining system.

I got a movie deal. I had to write a movie. Six weeks into writing this movie, I lay in the garden staring up at the sky, catatonic with fear. I did not know what a script should look like ― I’d never written one ― but I knew one thing: it shouldn’t look like this. This was… shameful. But shame with a very urgent deadline. I needed either to a) get a plastic surgeon to build me a different face, change my name by deed poll and start a new life as a goat farmer in Austria, or b) get help. For the first time in my life, I was going to have to… bother someone. With me.

For the first five minutes of the phone call, I was sobbing so hard he could not make out a word I was saying. I think he got, “I’m sorry,” and, “Just honestly, tell me to f*** off,” but no more than that. In the end, by process of elimination ― by shouting, “Are you dying? Is it cancer? Are you being held hostage, yes or no?” ― he gathered that my nervous breakdown was centred on my utter inability to write a movie. And that he wrote movies and I needed his help.

“Email the script to me,” he said.

Half an hour later, the phone rang.

“Babe. Do you want to do this together?”

For the next six months, he taught me everything he knew ― “A movie is just one thing happening after another”; “The problems of your third act are the problems of your first act”; “The key thing now is, we should go to the pub” ― as I excitedly typed and the script took shape. And I marvelled, truly shocked: is this what it’s like asking for help? Why did no one ever tell me it was such… fun?

The One Who Knew Everything About Hair

“Honey, you don’t need to backcomb so much.”

I’m in the toilet with a drag queen. I am going at my head with a comb. My bouff has catastrophically flopped.

“Like, I admire the attack and the intent ― but if you want real root-lift, you just need Schwarzkopf Dust It volume powder. I call it ‘cocaine for hair’. It makes it high.”

The next day, I ordered a six-pack. He/she did not lie. If you want Big Hair Advice, always ask a drag queen.

The Ones Who Gathered Round When There Was Trouble

The one I drunkenly argued with in the street at 1am when I wanted to walk home on my own.

“I wouldn’t let my wife walk home on her own,” he said reasonably.

“I call on Gloria Steinem and all the gods of feminism when I insist I WILL BE FINE,” I said, staggering away alone.

The next morning, I saw him again. “Sorry,” I said. “I just couldn’t bear you having to waste an hour looking after me.”

“Oh, I just followed you home.” He shrugged. “To make sure. It was fun.”

The one who willingly set fire to a potentially massive business deal when some big-money guy propositioned me as part of the “deal”. My friend ― when I told him ― took Money Guy outside and explained that, unless I received an apology in the next 30 seconds, “I will be punching you, very hard, in the face.”

And then the next day sent a crate of champagne with the note, “Revenge is a life well lived.”

The one who sent a pot of thyme with the note, “These are The Good Thymes. They will come again.”

The boys at school ― many years before the Lionesses ― who refused to play a football match against another school unless I was included. Even though I was awful. “Moran’s part of the team.”

The boy at my daughter’s school who, when she was ill, sat outside the house for an hour waiting to give her his “lucky pebble”: “It worked for me. It’s your turn to have it now.”

The teenage babysitter who, when our kids became suddenly morose, as we’d been away for a weekend, handed them his hair clippers and suggested they shave off all his hair: “It’ll be a laugh!”

I had thought the friendship of other women was something that could not be rivalled by boys and men: that women offered something deeper. But it’s just different. All these men offered something just as profound. With fewer words, perhaps, but just as much intent.

The One Who Uses Very Short Sentences

So the husband I came to London for, and searched for in the bigger buildings, turned out not to be what I thought he would be at all.

I thought I should be looking for the biggest rumpus in the room ― the kind of person who would be standing like a pirate on the prow of a fabulous monologue that had the whole room in suspense. And then I, as a Lady Chat Pirate, would ram him with my Ship of Monologue and a delightful sexual sea battle would then commence in which we would both, in the end, be victors. For that is the nature of love. As someone who has recently been diagnosed with ADHD, I guess I thought I’d find someone with similar neurodivergency and we could be AADDHHDD together. FULL-SCALE ENDLESS CONVERSATIONAL DIVERSIONS.

But this man used quite short sentences. And it utterly threw me.

For instance: it’s 1995, and we have run away from various life misfortunes to have a holiday together as friends. By the third night, we are lovers. Which is the 19th-century way of saying, “We had sex.”

In the morning, I ― anxious, overthinking, oververbal ― launch into a huge, thoughtful speech about how obviously we should not enter into a relationship. I am recently single – “You need a year between relationships. Love is a field you must let lie fallow.” He is my friend ― “It would be insane to risk our friendship for a holiday fling.”

He listens to all of it, nods patiently, waits for my clockwork to run down. And then says, “Or ― we could give it a go?”

There is no real argument against a very calm, confident, lovely man with big brown eyes saying, “Or ― we could give it a go?” It was a wholly reasonable suggestion. Indeed, it was the most logical suggestion. What else, in the circumstances, could we do? Every other possibility was unknowable. To the point where, five years later, I just kind of had to marry him ― as I didn’t want to give anyone else a go. This man ― this man’s short sentences were wise. I wanted to stay near them. They worked.

Example 2: I am still young ― 22 ― and incredibly socially anxious about parties. I haven’t yet learnt the knack of how to be awesome at them and I want to discuss my various ideas with him. Should I prepare a couple of anecdotes ― then war-game possible replies so, in turn, I can have prepared witty ripostes to them?

Or perhaps I haven’t yet found the right drink. I know I’m apt to get too drunk on wine, champagne, whisky or vodka, but I have a theory that maybe Dubonnet would be the drink that would make me the perfect party person.

Or perhaps it’s not drink I need but drugs. Maybe Valium? A little cocaine?

Or maybe I should come up with a Party Persona ― a whole new me I can pretend to be when I’m out that will win at parties? Be the Party Queen? Maybe a hat? A hat would make things easier.

Again, he listens to all this and says, “Or maybe ― you just don’t like parties?”

WOW. That is almost offensive. Heretical. Every young person loves parties. It’s the height of Britpop. How am I not going to go to parties? I have to love parties! What is he saying? I think about it.

“You’re right,” I say, with a sudden exhalation. “I don’t like parties.” I laugh at the relief. “Can we… not go to them?”

“That is totally allowed.”

On my 48th birthday, I mourn ageing. I sigh and say, “My hands are old.”

He takes my hands ― seemingly astonished by what I’ve said ― and looks down at them.

“But I love how your hands look. They just look like they’ve been… busy.”

I look at my hands again. He’s right. They’re not old; they’re just experts. I am changed again ― into someone who loves their hands. And so it’s his cardigan I wear; and his scar ― that c-section ― across my pelvis; and his love of Van Morrison we now share. And yes, the first time I went to his flat, he had
that picture of Paul McCartney on his wall. We recreated it with both our babies ― although it was quite hard ramming the first baby down the front of his cag-in-a-bag. We broke the zip.

People come and they change you. Look at all these men ― the realists, the heretics, the protectors, the teachers and the unboundaried podiatrists. There is no World of Women and World of Men. It’s just all us.

What About Men? by Caitlin Moran is published by Ebury Press (£10.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members