That’s not to say Dunham’s particular humor isn’t needed: “In a nod to gender equality, neither of us came” – that was a particular gem. Given Dunham’s longstanding messy candor – at five years old, she fibs to a woman at an art gallery, saying her father stuck a fork in her vagina – we know that a willingness to shock comes easily to her. It’s not brave to do something that doesn’t scare you. But as Dunham admits in a chapter that addresses her frequent nudity in Girls:

Indeed, when women’s memoirs are seen as “over-sharing” but men’s are “brave”, Dunham’s willingness to say it all is refreshing. Yes, this uber-successful 28-year-old has put pen to paper and laid bare her most embarrassing, personal and heartfelt moments in a collection of essays, email exchanges and listicles that in itself should indicate that she believes her voice is important. The setup for Not That Kind of Girl is almost entirely about the importance of women’s voices Dunham writes in the introduction about the “forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren’t needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter.”īut if women’s stories matter, why doesn’t Lena Dunham think that her stories matter, too?

But given Dunham’s talent, ambition and success, I don’t buy the coy deflection. But when Dunham describes her post-college life as a time when “nothing was a tragedy, and everything was a joke”, it’s less an observation than the unintentional theme of the whole book.Įven the title, with “learned” in scare quotes, is a noncommittal wink of sorts: Don’t worry, I don’t really have anything to teach you. Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned”, Dunham’s much-anticipated (and hotly-debated) debut book, is funny, smart and cringe-inducing in a good way.

Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham