Caitlin Moran: How To Be Hopeful

A Year of Attempting to Feel Less Awful About the World

‘No one’s inventing good, new futures any more,’ I say to my husband, Pete. ‘Everyone seems resigned to accepting that things will be dreadful. I can’t bear it. I need us to do something different.’

One morning, Caitlin Moran woke up -  and realised that she had reached Peak Despair. And she’s not alone - in a world of worsening news, online fist-fights, and filthy rivers, it’s hard not to feel, well, terrible. Of course, in books, and movies, when the heroine faces such a crisis, she makes a seismic life-change: moving to a remote, ramshackle farmhouse; walking an ancient, 600-mile pathway; or reconnecting with her primal, joyful self by adopting a baby hawk, or hare.  

But Caitlin’s new book, How to be Hopeful, is not that kind of book. She tried – but it turns out remote Welsh farmhouses are really expensive. No-one with a job can walk 600 miles. And it’s incredibly hard to get access to baby hawks in North London.

Instead, Caitlin decided to go on … a domestic quest. To see if she could stay in the same house, in the same neighbourhood, and the same awful modern world - but try to make better days. She left 800,000 followers on social media; eschewed 24/7 rolling-news for local newspapers; and sat on buses without headphones, to start listening to what people are really saying. Turns out they’re not, by and large, shouting hate-crimes at each other. They’re just working out whether to have chicken, or sausages for tea, instead.

Picking litter, donating blood, rewilding a garden, trying to understand where modern anxiety really comes from - slowly, all these things allowed for something that had felt impossible a year before: Caitlin learned to fall back in love with the world again.

How to be Hopeful is Caitlin’s story of how, over the course of a year, she realised that “waiting to feel hopeful again” just won’t work: being hopeful is a decision. It’s something - like laundry - you have to do. How To Be Hopeful is the diary of how one person started to do hopeful.  To celebrate the release of her brand-new memoir How To be Hopeful, Sunday Times Bestselling author Caitlin Moran will be heading out on tour accompanied by special guest hosts.  

There will also be an opportunity to put your questions to Caitlin and grab a signed hardback copy of How to be Hopeful.