Caitlin Moran has a fantasy of the night she and her sister Caz win an Academy Award for the film adaptation of her book “How to Be a Woman” (in real life, they are still working on the screenplay). They are dressed for the occasion, but they are not wearing dresses.

“We’ve made a pact that we will wear what we believe to be the greatest outfit of all time, which is the jumpsuit worn by the Ghostbusters,” Moran said recently. “We will both have the unlicensed nuclear accelerators on our backs” — those are the ghost-thwarting devices — “and we will be the first women ever to win an award while wearing comfortable shoes. All the other women will be wearing stilettos that hurt. But we will go onstage in boots, and everyone will know that we are having the best time of anyone.”

How to boldly wear, do and write whatever you want while dealing with the traumas of growing up female and the burdens of others’ expectations is the premise of “How to Be a Woman,” a runaway hit in Britain that has just been released in the United States. Part memoir, part philosophical rant, part manifesto written with the lightest touch, the book aims to make women proud of being feminists, Moran said, and “to show how all the lessons I’ve learned actually make some progress.”

The wide range of topics covered include menstruation, sexism at work, the writing of Germaine Greer, cruddy boyfriends and how it doesn’t matter if your breasts sag because the only people likely to see them “are going to approach them in an attitude of immense gratefulness, i.e., hungry children and men who are about to get laid.” The book begins in Wolverhampton, England, 24 years ago, on Moran’s 13th birthday. “I am 13 stone” (182 pounds), she writes. “I have no money, no friends, and boys throw gravel at me when they see me.”