Caitlin Moran returns with new book What About Men? all about the challenges and dangers of modern masculinity. In our Q&A, she tells us all about sparking romances and inventing Mum Rock.

Who would you like to see playing you in the movie about your life? Well, obviously (and aware I sound like a cunt), this has already happened: 2020’s How To Build A Girl was basically the story of my life (fat teenage council-estate girl becomes rock journalist, experiences many penises, learns that ‘being nice’ is generally more useful and soothing than ‘being constantly legendary’) and the very great Beanie Feldstein, from Booksmart and Lady Bird, played me. I went to her wedding last month; she married the producer of the film! They met on set!! Their relationship is the single-greatest by-product of me being alive, apart from my children and my invention of The Cheese Lollipop (a lump of cheese on a fork. Eat slowly).
If you were to return in a future life as an animal, what would it be? I think I answered this question whilst in the misty existential hinterland between incarnations with the word ‘dog’, as when I look at my life in its entirety, I really do seem to have lived the life of a dog. I wouldn’t describe all my choices over the last 47 years as ‘100% human’, up to and including jumping up and licking people’s faces from excitement.
If you were playing in an escape room name two other people you’d recruit to help you get out? Obviously, Ray Mears and Chris Rock. Ray Mears would practically get us out with his peerless survival skills, and Chris Rock would give a running, sarcastic commentary on the whole thing.

When was the last time you were mistaken for someone else? I’m sporadically asked to ‘go on the red carpet’ and always decline, because 101% of the people there will be more famous than me. But the one time I was ‘made’ to do it, the first photographer shouted, ‘OVER HERE, PALOMA!’ because we have the same hair. All I could see was my mate Sali behind them literally collapsing with laughter.

What’s the best cover version ever? There’s a nine-minute full work-out of ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ by Santa Esmerelda which is absolutely fucking barking. But my tricksy answer would be Fleetwood Mac’s 2004 live version of ‘Silver Springs’, essentially a cover of their 1976 original. Stevie Nicks’ voice is a full, husky key lower than the studio version, and she’s singing ‘I’ll follow you down til the sound of my voice will haunt you’ to former lover Lyndsey Buckingham, in the decades-long knowledge that her original lyrics predicted the future perfectly: he HAS been haunted by her voice for half his lifetime. He should never have screwed her over. And every night, she sings it to him; salt in the wound. Long, beautiful, harmonic revenge.
Whose speaking voice soothes your ears? Definitely not mine. I will run out of any room where I hear it. Difficult, given that it comes out of me.

Tell us something you wish you had discovered sooner in life? Silicone powder for hair. Instant root-life, without back-combing. A Spanish friend calls it ‘hair cocaine’, in that it makes your hair high. Fully four inches higher. 
Describe your perfect Saturday evening? Chickpea stew and four episodes of Nothing To Declare, the documentary series about customs at Sydney Airport. A Canadian woman once tried to smuggle a cat in her handbag into Australia. When asked why, she replied, ‘it’s my emotional support cat. I suffer from anxiety and I have come to Australia to hang glide, so needed my cat with me.’ So many questions . . . 
If you were a ghost, who would you haunt? Trump. My greatest dream is to see him shit himself live on TV, and maybe ‘a ghost’ could help with that.

If you could relive any day of your life, which one would it be? I probably would go back and relive the birth of my children. As they both happened over 20 years ago, I can’t believe these two now-adult women actually came out of my toilet-area. It all still seems so very unlikely.

What’s your earliest recollection of winning something? I won a tin of coloured pencils at school for ‘best cupcakes’. All the other children had quite obviously got their parents to help them as their cupcakes were very neatly iced. Mine just looked like a mad bag of shit. 
Did you have a nickname at school that you were ok with? ‘Fatty’, a nickname no fat person has ever enjoyed.

If you were to start a tribute act to a band or singer, who would it be in tribute to and what would it be called? Kate Bush, and it would be me and 12 other similarly Kate Bush-obsessed middle-aged women, and we would be called Mothering Heights. Time to invent Mum Rock.
When were you most recently astonished by something? The government committee that’s supposed to be tackling the sewage crisis in our rivers and seas revealed they’d only met once in the last year. Yeah, no rush; we live in a world of poo where otters are chewing used Tampax like Winston Churchill with a red cigar, but don’t break into a sweat, guys.

Which famous person would be your ideal holiday companion? Chris Packham. We’d go on a nature walk and he’d tell me everything we’re looking at, and we’d pick up poo and identify it, and I’d tell him that I love him.

As an adult, what has a child said to you that made a powerful impact? Well, when my daughter told me she had an eating disorder and was ‘too scared’ to drink water in case it made her ‘fat’, that was powerful in the same way a nuclear explosion is ‘powerful’. She had to fight hard over the next four years to get better. But she’s amazing, and she did, and she’s fully recovered now. 
Tell us one thing about yourself that would surprise people? If I couldn’t write, I’d want to be a town planner? I’m obsessed with how where you live dictates how you live.

When did you last cry? At Beanie Feldstein’s wedding. She and her new wife, Bonnie, wrote the most beautiful, intense, honest, loving vows.

What’s the most hi-tech item in your home? Technically, the human brain is still, to our knowledge, the most sophisticated, advanced and complex thing in all of time and space. So, I guess it’s me.

What’s a skill you’d love to learn but never got round to? I’d love to speak several languages or, more specifically, think in different languages. That’s got to be transformative; we are so shaped by the words in our heads and how we use them. I’d love to be able to take a driving lesson without screaming, ‘I KNOW I’M GOING TO CRASH AND TAKE THE LIVES OF SEVERAL INNOCENTS.’ And I’d love to be able to do modern street-dance, and just pop a Worm without throwing my back out.

By decree of your local council, you’ve been ordered to destroy one room in your house and all of its contents. Which room do you choose? Now we’ve got a telly in the kitchen, the living room could go. So long as you’ve got a telly somewhere, you can technically do without a sofa. Just sit on the table instead.

If you were selected as the next 007, where would you pick as your first luxury destination for espionage? Venice. I want to see it before cataclysmic global warming makes it sink, once more, beneath the waves; a testimony to how humanity still hasn’t realised it will have to change to save the things that it purports to adore and value. Nice cheerful note to end on! Actually, I can’t end on a sad note; it’s against all my core values. So I’m going to say Wolverhampton, because I want to see 007 try and be a flash prick when up against one of my admirably dolorous hometown people, who would look at his Aston Martin and tell him, ‘to be fair, bab, I wouldn’t leave that in the Lidl car park: you’ll get keyed.’

What About Men? is published by Ebury on Thursday 6 July; Caitlin Moran talks about the book at Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh on Saturday 15 July.