Ruth Scurr

Too many of our children are battling severe depression

Caitlin Moran describes the chronic crisis in adolescent mental health care, as she tries desperately to cope with her daughter’s three suicide attempts

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Christopher Hitchens once said that women just aren’t as funny as men and Caitlin Moran believed him. But that was many years ago — the great male essayist and orator has been dead for a decade — and Moran has matured into a bold, wise, middle-aged comedienne. When she was growing up in the 1980s, funny women such as Joan Rivers, Roseanne Barr and Victoria Wood ‘were rare and regarded as a freak of nature’. With retrospect, Moran realises that ‘Hitchens and I were, respectively, too male, or too young to have ever been invited into a coven — of which there are millions across the world’.

Moran’s new book is dedicated to her coven, also known as Team Tits. A coven is a place

where middle-aged women withdraw from the world to be with those who have, like them, gone through abortion, death, miscarriage, nervous breakdowns, funerals, unemployment, poverty, fear, hospital appointments and broken hearts – where they sometimes weep and comfort each other, but more often make jokes so pitch black they can only be laughed at by a fellow Hag.

If you are not currently a member of a coven, Moran hopes you will be soon, and in the meantime you can join hers.

If you are not a member of a coven, Moran hopes you soon will be, and in the meantime you can join hers

Sex, of course, is a topic of interest within the coven: how can it be sustained inside a long-term relationship while cohabiting with young or teenage children? Moran describes scheduling ‘maintenance sex’ with her husband for the hour after the school bus has left. This led to ‘the Incident of 2009’, when one of her two daughters returned for a netball kit and heard the screamed injunction: ‘DON’T COME IN THE KITCHEN – WE’RE TRYING TO CATCH A RAT!’ Afterwards, ‘visual confirmation’ that the children were actually on the bus was required before ‘trouser time’.

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