Not That Kind of Girl
A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned”
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3.4 • 5 Ratings
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- €9.99
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- €9.99
Publisher Description
Lena Dunham, acclaimed writer-director-star of HBO and Sky Atlantic’s ‘Girls’ and the award-winning movie ‘Tiny Furniture’, displays her unique powers of observation, wisdom and humour in this exceptional collection of essays.
“If I could take what I’ve learned and make one menial job easier for you, or prevent you from having the kind of sex where you feel you must keep your sneakers on in case you want to run away during the act, then every misstep of mine was worthwhile. I’m already predicting my future shame at thinking I had anything to offer you, but also my future glory in having stopped you from trying an expensive juice cleanse or thinking that it was your fault when the person you are dating suddenly backs away, intimidated by the clarity of your personal mission here on earth. No, I am not a sexpert, a psychologist, or a dietician. I am not a mother of three or the owner of a successful hosiery franchise. But I am a girl with a keen interest in having it all, and what follows are hopeful dispatches from the frontlines of that struggle.”
Reviews
‘It’s not Lena Dunham’s candour that makes me gasp. Rather, it’s her writing – which is full of surprises where you least expect them. This is a fine, subversive book’ David Sedaris
‘Always funny, sometimes wrenching, these essays are a testament to the creative wonder that is Lena Dunham’ Judy Blume
‘Dunham’s writing is just as smart, honest, sophisticated, dangerous, and charming as her work on ‘Girls’. Its essential quality is a kind of joyful super-awareness: of herself, the world, the human. Reading her makes you glad to be in the world, and glad that she’s in it with you’ George Saunders
‘Very few women have become famous for being who they actually are, nuanced and imperfect. When honesty happens, it’s usually couched in self-ridicule or self-help. Dunham doesn’t apologise like that – she simply tells her story as if it might be interesting. The result is shocking and radical because it is utterly familiar. ‘Not That Kind of Girl’ is hilarious, artful, and staggeringly intimate; I read it shivering with recognition’ Miranda July
‘Frank, fearless and funny … made me want to cry out with thanks that a talented, intelligent woman has said and done worse things than I have and is repeating them without a scrap of shame … ‘Not That Kind of Girl’ is funny, empowering and as good a millennial guide for navigating and laughing at your foggy adolescence and murky twenties as there can be. I only wish it had been around earlier’ Sunday Times
‘I love Lena’s book … more shocking than I was expecting, sadder and more beautiful – anyway; within a few pages … I’m charmed, anxious, furious and totally committed’ Nina Stibbe, Observer
‘Very funny … and imbues the gloom with hope … “Having it all” need not mean hitting narrow markers of success – the perfect job/man/body – but instead being able to own your experiences: the good, the bad, the ugly. All of it’ Independent
‘Dunham’s first book is seldom less than very funny’ Iona McLaren, Sunday Telegraph
About the author
At only 23 years old, Dunham wrote, directed and starred in the multi-award winning ‘Tiny Furniture’. She now stars in the HBO series, ‘Girls’, which she created and also serves as an executive producer and writer. Dunham graduated from Oberlin College in 2008 with a degree in Creative Writing and currently resides in New York City.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reviewed by Rachel Deahl. Filmmaker (Tiny Furniture) and TV creator (Girls) Dunham has been compared to all manner of comic intellectual impresarios, from Woody Allen to Nora Ephron and Tina Fey. This makes it all the more delightful that Dunham mines her first book from an unexpected source: Helen Gurley Brown's Having It All, which she stumbled upon in a thrift store in college. Dunham hopes that her collection of personal essays will do for its intended readers the young and female what the one-time Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief's 1982 guide did for her. Having It All is, Dunham admits, full of mostly dated and "bananas" advice on everything from dieting to man pleasing but it imparted an important takeaway: meek women can inherit success, love, and self-worth, if not the Earth. Dunham is not unlike these women (or "Mouseburgers," in Brown's words), who can, she explains, "triumph, having lived to tell the tale of being overlooked and underloved." She breaks her book into sections ("Love & Sex," "Body," "Work," etc.) and offers tales of her own experiences being overlooked and underloved. If that sounds corny or overly earnest, the essays that compose the book are neither. They're dark, discomforting, and very funny. Whether discussing her forays into yo-yo dieting (" Diet' Is a Four-Letter Word") or the time she thinks she might have been raped ("Barry"), Dunham is expert at combining despair and humor. Describing a misanthropic ex, she writes: "His critical nature proved suffocating he hated my skirts, my friends, and my work. He hated rom-coms and just plain coms." The book is filled with amusing phrases like this one, as Dunham delivers sad and probably, for many readers, sadly familiar tales of hating her body and trying too hard to make undeserving men love her. Dunham is an oddly polarizing figure in today's culture maybe because she's too young and successful; maybe because she gets conflated her with Hannah Horvath, her self-involved character on Girls; or maybe simply because her detractors are louder than her fans but hopefully this won't keep readers away from this collection. It would be a shame, because the book is touching, at times profound, and deeply funny. It also addresses something that other female funny people of Dunham's stature do not. The myth, as Gurley Brown and others have laid it out, is that we can shed our Mouseburger selves to become something better. While Dunham is eager for that something better, she doesn't want to lose sight of the Mouseburger inside. This is one of the things she grapples with throughout these essays: how we become accepted and loved and popular, without casting aside, or trying to hide, the unloved, unpopular people we once were. In fact, Dunham seems to want to revel in the dark spaces the terrifying and awkward moments in life which is pretty great. Not only does this provide her wonderful material, but it's an invigorating, refreshing slap in the face to a world that is so unwelcoming to all the amusing, sweet, smart Mouseburgers out there. Rachel Deahl is PW's News Director.
