Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham – review

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Still shy of thirty, Lena Dunham has garnered fame, acclaim, and criticism — and apparently enough life experience to warrant a $3.5 million book deal. Her recent memoir, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned” is a self-help book written through loose anecdotes, splintered into sections on sex, bodies, relationships, work, and a more general exploration of Dunham’s perpetual anxieties about her own mortality.

She writes with unflinching honesty that bolsters the book while perhaps turning off the rare reader who becomes squeamish at detailed descriptions of the uterine wall. Her mouth is perpetually open. Nothing is off-limits. We skip across horrifically embarrassing pre-teen years, her masturbation habits and the bizarre things she did to her sister as a child. We learn of her awful ex-boyfriends and her reliance on various therapists to remain sane. Her humour is perhaps enabled by this total refusal to blush. When she discusses her loss of virginity and condoms in potted plants, learning to masturbate and “assne”, she skimps on nothing. While painful to read at times, every anecdote of terrible, terrible sex serves as an antidote to the silky and fantastical world of rom-coms and billboards. Rather, here are guys who conclude the loss of your virginity by donning your bicycle helmet, proclaiming it “the going steady helmet”.

In the hippie haven of Oberlin College, Dunham was dubbed “Little Lena from Soho” and informed her upbringing was not very “real”. The criticism has followed her since. Her attempt at post-college listlessness is unconvincing, with she and her friends afforded the luxury of partying in Manhattan until ambition strikes, without rent woes or unpaid bills. She is shamelessly self-involved, a fault she admits to frankly and frequently. Upon hearing her sister is a lesbian, her initial reaction is, “Who did you tell before you told me?” We hear of her trials and tribulations. We are amused and gleefully grossed-out, but we take away nothing but a handful of clever one-liners.

As the target audience for this book, I was left unsure what Dunham wanted to teach me. She aims to guide young women away from her own missteps, but at best, her memoir offers not prevention, but commiseration. A woman who powered through embarrassment and naysayers and achieved success, Dunham has found a way to write and to be wholly and unabashedly herself.

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