Caitlin Moran talks feminism, her hippy childhood and working class pride

Moran, though, is quick to shoot down any misunderstanding that she's morphed into an ego-driven monster. "I'm sorry for dicking you about," she says. "This week blew up insanely. I apologise a million times. I have spent my career sitting in hotel lobbies waiting for Rihanna to deign to come down and be interviewed, so I know the frustration of thinking: 'I don't care. I'm just trying to do my job. Please ring me back.'"

With that neatly cleared up, it's on to talking about how life is panning out for the writer and social commentator who appears to be on a one-woman mission to rewrite the pop culture and feminist lexicon.

Moran, 39, will be in Glasgow next month with her How To Build A Girl 2 tour. As well as stand-up comedy, the show will feature a raft of celebrity stories, "like the amazing day where I spent the morning accidentally trying to break into Kate Moss's house and then the afternoon in Benedict Cumberbatch's parent's house getting drunk with him and making him do impressions of an owl".

But there is a far deeper crux to her musings. Irreverent, cheeky and bold, Moran has her own firebrand of feminism, which blows away the cobwebs and makes it sparky and fun.

For her tour, Moran has created a range of themed merchandise such as mugs, T-shirts, tea towels (profits to women's domestic violence charity Refuge), which bear three simple rules: 1. Women are equal to men; 2. Don't be a dick; 3. That's it.

"All that feminism means is women being equal to men and by that extension all humans being equal," says Moran. "We are a tiny little troubled blue-green planet and need every brain on board we can get. Whenever you look at any issue of inequality - whether it be class or race or religion or physical ability or sex or gender or sexuality - it just means that people who could be contributing to this world are having to deal with a whole load of other problems."

Moran isn't done yet, and each point she makes unleashes a fresh stream of consciousness. Yet she has a remarkable knack for not veering off course, nor, for that matter, pausing to draw breath.

"We are making our world stupider than we need to. I genuinely think that if everyone was happy, able to get an equal education, feel good about themselves and allowed to contribute to society in politics, business and religion, we would have solved every single problem we have. But instead we are relying on straight white men to come up with all the ideas.

"Straight white university-educated men are less than seven per cent of the world. They are the ones that have generally got all the power, so this does indeed look like a world that is only using seven per cent of its brains right now."

Born in Brighton and raised in a three-bedroom council house in Wolverhampton, Moran's childhood was less than conventional. Home-schooled from the age of 11, she paints a colourful portrait of her upbringing as the eldest of eight children in what Moran dubs the "only hippy family" in the West Midlands city.

"My parents were hippies so we were always odd ones out at school and never really fitted in," she says. "In 1986 my parents said: 'Do you want to be home-schooled?' and we all went, 'Yeah.' It was as simple as that. We all stayed at home, watched MGM musicals and ate an enormous amount of cheese."

Moran was a voracious writer throughout her teens ("I was terribly lonely," she says) and at 15 won The Observer's Young Reporter of the Year. A year later, at 16, she began writing for weekly music magazine, Melody Maker, and had her first book published, a children's novel called The Chronicles Of Narmo. By 18, Moran was a regular voice in The Times, the newspaper for which she still pens two columns a week.

To date, she has published four books, including How To Be A Woman and Moranthology. Her debut adult novel, How To Build A Girl, is the first in a proposed trilogy with How To Be Famous and How To Change The World set to follow.

Moran describes the "most extraordinary moment" of her career so far as the day she "opened up the newspaper and there was a paparazzi shot of Kate Moss on the beach, topless, smoking a fag and drinking a glass of Champagne while reading How To Be A Woman".

She and her younger sister Caroline (or "Caz" as Moran fondly calls her) have co-written Raised By Wolves, a six-part comedy series which taps into their brilliantly kooky, left-field childhood.

The main protagonists, Germaine and Aretha Garry (played by Helen Monks and Alexa Davies), are based on the sisters with Moran asserting that "while about 30 per cent of things in the show actually happened to us, the characters and scenarios are pretty much real".

Her alter-ego, Germaine, is an exuberant over-sharer, a description which, it's fair to say, could equally be applied to Moran. "Oh God yeah," she exclaims. "The amount of times I would go into my sister Caz's room - she's an introvert, ginger intellectual while I'm extrovert, lusty brunette - throw myself onto her bed and say: 'I need to talk to you about my latest crush, I'm so in love with Chevy Chase.'

"She would try and push me off the bed and say: 'Do not tell me anything about your sexuality, I forbid you to tell me any of your lustful thoughts.' We realised this was the perfect sitcom relationship: two people who are stuck together, completely different to each other, but who have no other friends so they have to rely on each other."

Her unconventional background has played a key role in shaping Moran's trademark verve and fearless polemic. "It's meant I have been able to write about things which are perhaps different or unusual," she says. "Lots of times people have said: 'You're very brave to write so honestly about physicality, fat, self-harm, abortion, mental illness, poverty and self-loathing.'

"Because I had never really been out in society, to school or university or worked in an office, I didn't realise how not normal that is." She breaks into a chuckle, perhaps realising how ridiculous that statement sounds. "I just kind of thought everyone was talking about this stuff because these are the important things, the ones that f*** you up and form our human experiences."

Moran is particularly forthright on the topic of gender equality. According to a recent estimate by the World Economic Forum it's going to take 79 years and 11 months until companies and governments will be equally led by women and men. Isn't that depressing? "Yes!" enthuses Moran. "It's insane."

She thinks many young women feel uncomfortable with the term feminism because they view it as something for the realms of academia and politics whereas, Moran argues, it should be culturally accessible by all.

"Feminism doesn't come from a Bible. It's not science. There aren't rules to it," says Moran. "You don't need to read all of these books or study it. If you have the feeling that women should be equal to men - something I would say most women are quite invested in - then it's down to you to say what it is.

"There are 3.3 billion women in the world so there are 3.3 billion different kinds of feminism," she continues. "Make yours up. Feminism is only as strong as the people who are in it. It should be seen as a creative, cultural act that anyone can join in on in the same way fashion is, rather than being seen as an academic, dusty thing that we only leave to professional feminist classes. B***s to that."

Married with two daughters, Moran lives in London in what she describes as the "media w**kers' paradise" of Crouch End. "I live five doors down from James McAvoy," she says. "That makes life very pleasant being able to see Mr Tumnus walking along the street."

She and her husband Pete Paphides, a music critic, met while working at Melody Maker. "Everyone else was into cool and scary bands like Skinny Puppy and Front 242, horrible industrial stuff," she says. "Pete came over to me and said: 'I'm going to tell you a secret. I'm into Crowded House.' I said: 'I am too!' That was how we bonded because we both loved Crowded House, who were seen as absolutely unacceptable at the time."

While it may not have been quite love at first sight for Moran (although it wasn't far off it), Paphides certainly knew he had found the woman of his dreams. "I'd had a column in the Observer which I had sat down and written because I was 17 and so lonely. I wanted people to be my friend and/or fancy me," recalls Moran. "He had seen that column and fancied me. When we finally met he said: 'Oh my God, I've written you a letter. I've got it at my house. I was going to send it to you.' We went back to his house and he showed me the fan letter he had written me.

"For him it was love at first sight because he had seen me in the paper. When I first saw him everyone else was wearing leather jackets and he was wearing a cardigan. I thought: 'I like this boy.'"

Moran stands out with her Cruella de Vil hair streak and rubbery facial expressions. She describes her distinctive sense of style as 70 per cent 1990s student disco ("stripy tights, Doc Martens, shorts, plaid shirts, bottle of cider in my hand") and 30 per cent 1950s barmaid ("leopardskin, quite tight dress and lots of eyeliner").

When not working, Moran says she can typically be found in one of three places: the sofa, the garden or on Twitter. "I lie on the sofa with my daughters and watch any programme with Bear Grylls in it," she says. "We love the idea that this man is the supreme survivalist but he seems to spend all of his time drinking his own urine. Surely the mark of a good survivalist is that you are not at the point where you have to drink your own wazz?

"I'm also obsessed with my garden. It is themed around Alice In Wonderland where I either have gigantic plants or very tiny plants. It's supposed to screw with your perception and perspective.

"I live on Twitter making jokes and hanging out with my mates. Those are my socials. They basically triangulate 10 square metres from my sofa to the garden to my kitchen table to be on Twitter. I'm not a great traveller."

I'm curious as to what nuggets of wisdom Moran has imparted to daughters Nancy, 12, and Lizzie, 14 - pseudonyms chosen by their mother - when it comes to female empowerment.

"The thing about feminism is it's not a set of rules, it's a set of tools," says Moran. "I can watch MTV with my daughters and say: 'Here comes Rihanna in another video where she is just in a bra and pants pretending to have sex in a field.

"The thing about Rihanna, girls, is that pop music should be sexy, but this is the 59th video where Rihanna has been dressed like this. The statistics are that on probably at least three or four of these videos, she's had a bad cold that day or having her period.

"When they cut filming, she is getting straight into an anorak, crying, and saying: 'I wish I could have the day off, I wish I could just wear a cardigan and a pair of jeans in one of these videos.'"

She believes there is "an enormous amount of fun" to be drawn once you have the tools to analyse and ultimately break down sexism and objectification. "I have never understood why feminists are seen as dour and no fun," she says. "If you can sit there taking the p*** out of a world that is so obviously w**k and horrible to women, one so stupid and clichéd, if you can rip the p*** out of it, then that is feminism right there. You cannot be oppressed if you are laughing at your oppressor."

Moran is fiercely proud of her working-class roots. There is a moment in How To Build A Girl when the main character Johanna has an epiphany that being working class isn't a bad thing, it's simply different. "Exactly," says Moran. "We are not failed middle class. People will say to me: 'Oh, you are middle-class now because you have earned money and are successful.'

"Hang on, because if that's true, then you are defining being working class as by failure and not having money and not being successful. That is not how it works. I think there is a distinct cultural difference between working and middle classes. I am distinctly working class.

"The way that the working classes have been disenfranchised in this country, made to feel terrible about themselves, their skills aren't being used and their culture is being crushed, is something I intend to explore over several hopefully amusing books."

Caitlin Moran's tour, How To Build A Girl 2, will be at the Pavilion Theatre in Glasgow on April 13. For ticket information, visit paviliontheatre.co.uk

Her book, How To Build A Girl, is published in paperback by Ebury Press, priced £7.99 on April 9.