Put down Fifty Shades of Grey. We've got something equally smutty but infinitely smarter to recommend. How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran is a feminist manifesto like none you've ever read. Most of us don't go around reading feminist manifestos but this one is for everyone -- even if you are a dude and maybe even especially so.

How to Be a Woman passes our funny-lady-memoir test. We still long to be Moran's friend even after we read the last word of her foul-mouthed, opinionated, TMI account of every experience from menstruation to pornography to abortion. You will be horrified if you hate the word vagina even as Moran herself declines the usage in favor of a more literary word. If you think you would be offended, please read One Call Away: Answering Life's Challenges with Unshakable Faith by Brenda Warner and Jennifer Schuchmann. Warner's story is compelling and has everything memoir readers love including football. But if you think you can take Moran's in-your-face drive for equality, then give How to Be a Woman a consensual whirl.

Despite the title, How to Be a Woman isn't a "how to" ala Shannen Doherty's Badass (rehab your bitchy reputation by adopting a baby from another country) or memoir ala Tina Fey's Bossypants (the current yardstick for memoirs by female comedic writers). It's a face off with the status quo and an assertion of equality. Also unlike the authors of both of those books, Moran is British, but not the look-down-your-nose-at-people sort. Well, she may be but How to Be a Woman doesn't leave you feeling judged the way reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle does. Of course Kingsolver is a local legend and not at all British. We're losing our way here. The point is that Moran shares her lessons as Jesus shared his -- through allegory. If you want a peek into her life, you are obligated to read the lessons she gained from those experiences.

But wait; there's more! Moran has a new book hitting shelves titled Moranthology in which she tackles "THE REST OF THE WORLD: Ghostbusters, Twitter, caffeine, panic attacks, Michael Jackson's memorial service, being a middle-class marijuana addict, Doctor Who, binge-drinking, Downton Abbey, pandas, [her] own tragically early death, and [her] repeated failure to get anyone to adopt the nickname [she has] chosen for [her]self: 'Puffin'." Someone buy it quick(ly*).

* What? She's a journalist and is probably into grammar and AP Style and stuff. We don't wish to offend because we want her to contact us on Twitter again and be our BFF and ignore that we aren't properly footnoting.

We didn't get the day off but we did make time to read How to Be a Woman. To endear ourselves to Moran we will make time for Germaine Greer's Female Eunuch, the Twilight to Moran's Fifty Shades of Grey.

How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran
Harper Perennial
978-0062124296