How to Be Massive, Reviewed

Aoife Dooley is an illustrator and graphic designer who hails from Coolock and is best known for her Instagram and Facebook page “Your One Nikita”, which hilariously depicts the day-to-day trials and tribulations of a typical Dublin hun.

Dooley has recently released her debut book, an illustrated guide to being the ultimate stun hun. How to be Massive is a comprehensive manual on all things stunnin’, a hun bible if you will. More, it’s an astutely observed, funny and at times touching comic of social history.

Dooley has achieved something quite brilliant with this gem: an accomplished portrait of a fierce and feisty working-class Dublin girl that never mocks and comes straight from the heart.

Most of all, it’s absolutely hilarious. I genuinely laughed my head off throughout the book and tore through it in an hour or so. My only criticism is that I wanted more of Nikita’s wisdom.

How to be Massive arrived just in the nick of time for me. You see, it’s my graduation next week, and, while most of the time I’m happy with my scruffy, charity-shop, art-student-meets-’90s-sports-personality look, for this occasion I want to pull out all the stops and get seriously glammed up.

What better advisor could I have than the queen of stun huns, Nikita? From hair to make up to choosing the perfect outfit, she has it all sorted.

I now know how to contour my face to selfie perfection, achieve the perfect hun bun, and, most importantly, how to deal with the masses while shopping for the perfect outfit, thanks to the very useful, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin section “How to avoid head melts while shoppin’”.

Even more useful, I now have a wealth of options to choose from when wondering what the hell I’m going to talk to the hairdresser about for the foreseeable future. My hair’s “pure tick”, as illustrated on the page on hair types, and I have to spend hours in there.

What I found so enjoyable about Dooley’s illustrations was the pure familiarity of them, something that I think crosses any boundaries of class and gender; my English-born mum and boyfriend both found laughs aplenty within the pages.

Even if you’re not a hun (although you’re probably lying to yourself, we all have a bit of hun in us … how was that spicebag last night?) then you definitely know one and will find many a familiar scenario in Dooley’s sharp observational work.

Coming of age in a rural town circa 2007, the terms “hun” and “girlo” hadn’t yet come to include young ones from beyond the Pale, but we still had plenty in common. While Nikita was hiding her naggin in her hun bun, I was stealthily sneaking it in tucked down the back of my dress or skirt, with a coat hiding the bump.

Who am I kidding? I still do this on a fairly regular basis.

But the point I am trying to make is that it doesn’t matter where in Ireland you come from, or what part of town you frequent; if you’re a girl in your teens or twenties, you’re going to have plenty of common ground to laugh about with the deadly Nikita.

Boy racers make a brief appearance in one of my favourite moments in the book, “How ye know if a fella likes ye – He tries to impress ye”, where Nikita expresses so articulately what nearly every girl confronted with a noisy engine has ever thought. “Just because you’re able to rev your car up and down the road doesn’t mean ye have a big mickey, hun. Calm down, it’s after 8, your ma’s looking for her car back.” Priceless.

Nikita is a stun hun with a heart of gold, and if you don’t want to be her, you’ll want her as your new besto. A kindred spirit, I feel, she’s officially been added to the list of people I don’t know in real life but do know would make excellent best-friend material. Others include Rihanna, David Attenborough, Jennifer Lawrence, and Louis Theroux. A right bunch of stun huns.

In our current climate of political and socio-economic unrest and upheaval, where a pox like Trump has just been elected president and us Irish girlos are still fighting for bodily autonomy, it’s a much-needed breath of fresh air to escape into Dooley’s latest creation and have a well-deserved laugh.

How to be Massive is the perfect stocking-filler for your favourite hun this Christmas – be that your sister, granny, cool aunt or quirky uncle. A true celebration of hun culture and working-class women, I couldn’t recommend it highly enough, and challenge you not to laugh out loud while reading it.

How to Be Massive by Aoife Dooley (Gill, 2016) is available here.