Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's Learned

I read this when it was first released and am reviewing it much later. I had not/have not seen Girls and had not read anything else by Dunham; I had only read pre-release reviews extolling it as a groundbreaking work by a voice of millennial feminism.

I think I made it as far as the chapter that was entirely a list of foods with accompanying caloric intakes when I just started skimming. My impression of that essay (based also on what had preceded it) was that Dunham likely wrote it on a cocktail napkin of an upscale bar late, late on evening. It was likely the kind of bar where I would gauge the price of a drink in terms of what percentage of my rent it was. I picture her there after a day of doing . . . very trendy, sophisticated things show more that I really wouldn't understand. Stuff. Things. That involved assistants. In-jokes and knowing winks based on a complex and dense shared background.

The preceding snide paragraph is an attempt to convey how distant I felt from the world that Dunham (repeatedly) describes. I do not demand that memoirists/essayists live a life identical to mine; reading about my own life would be pretty tedious. However, many other writers with vastly different experiences manage to create a sense of intimacy or in-gathering-- to invite you into what they're describing-- and Dunham does not do that. Each essay is a door quietly closing in the reader's face: this is what it was like, but I can only tell you about it. That is the only way I can really express the peculiar coolness of this volume.

Because I know so little of Dunham, I'm not sure if the "feminist voice" label is her own or if it somehow got applied to her during the press-release process. One way or the other, I also don't understand how this book would earn that distinction. Broadly speaking, I did not note her saying anything new or noteworthy in a new or remarkable way. The lack of self-awareness on so many levels is a deep impairment to any contribution to a feminist discussion; it's a roadblock to so many avenues of discourse. I have trouble picturing the setting in which this book would actually be useful: you would have to find the exactly appropriate (narrow) audience, and then you would have to positively mine the book for the points worthy of discussion. I honestly have trouble labeling her self-effacing rather than oblivious. Again, there are other memoirists who play off problematic backgrounds (etc.) using various devices: for example, they may be tongue-in-cheek. Dunham offers no stylistic counterpoint to the many uncomfortable moments in the essays; such devices might assure the reader that they're not simply being presented with no self-critique or self-analysis.

By the time I'd reached the end, Dunham had left me variously exasperated and infuriated. The touching incident that later reached high furor in the media was not at a fever pitch yet, and thus I had my own little list of grievances even at the time.

I do very much wish Dorothy Parker was still around to review this one. show less

I can't say that I always agree with Lena Dunham, but I agree with her approach to a lot of things. She's incapable of not sharing and uncomfortable with secrets and this is not for attention, it's how she ticks. She knows she doesn't have everything figured out and that is empowering for her, rather than holding her back. She's got a lot of fears but she confronts them and sees where the road takes her. And she's damn funny when she does it.

This is not a book for everyone and if you don't like Dunham, you'll probably hate it. I like that she's in her mid-20's and not sure where she goes from here, but she's excited about it. I like that she owns her past and realizes she's made mistakes, will make more, and hasn't learned all her show more lessons yet. She feels so REAL, and I think that's the biggest thing she's trying to convey. Watching someone embrace their flaws, not glorifying them, just recognizing they're part of being human, is refreshing. show less

If you read the comments on negative reviews here on Goodreads, these are some recurring themes you'll run into:

"You didn't read this whole entire book, so you're not allowed to rate or review it."

"Some reviewers are obviously just looking for an excuse to trash books."

"If you don't like a book, why go on and on about it? Put it down and get on with your life, already. Think about the things you could have done in time you spent writing this review."

"Clearly you're just a very negative person."

"I loved it. Clearly we didn't read the same book."

"Why did you read a book you don't even like?"

The fact that the last question on that list directly contradicts the first is a clue to what's going on here.

What's going on here is that some show more readers are treating books they love like sacred texts.

A friend of mine once got in touch with another friend he hadn't seen in a while. She was now devoutly religious, and urged him to convert to her faith. She was happier than she'd ever been, she said, and she wanted him to be happy, too. She gave him a copy of what was now her holy book. "Please, read this," she said. "Then you'll understand."

He read it. He still didn't want to convert to her religion.

"Why not?" she asked.

He attempted to engage her in conversation, to discuss issues the book in question had brought up for him. He wanted to hear her opinions, to see how she would answer his questions. She was confused and dismayed.

"That's not how you're supposed to read it," she said. "You're not supposed to pick it apart like that. You're supposed to read it with your heart."

It doesn't matter which holy book I'm talking about. Everyone who's read any of the livelier comment sections of any of the negative reviews on Goodreads knows that in terms of the attitude I just described, I could be talking about Jane Austen or Jane Eyre or the latest YA bestseller. People who love these works are sometimes not content with loving the books they love. They have to convert the heretics who are refusing to bow to the greatness that stands before them.

I read this book because I saw people being trashed for disliking it solely because of some understandably infamous passages – quotes that got around so widely that even people who can't remember Lena Dunham's name know some things she claims to have done to her younger sister.

"You're taking those quotes out of context," commenters insisted. "You can't judge this book unless you've read it."

The short answer: Fine. I read the book. I saw some very good writing. I also saw some very repulsive writing. And those infamous quotes are, to me, every bit as creepy in context as out of it.

The longer, more important answer: You didn't really mean that you thought the reviewers in question should at least read this book before commenting on it. You meant that you wanted them to read this book, experience a Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus blinded-by-the-light conversion, fall off their high horses, and sing Lena Dunham's praises in exactly the same key you do.

I watched some clips from Girls. I'm planning to see Dunham's film Tiny Furniture, because it looks wonderfully bizarre. I understand that Lena Dunham is an extremely talented writer, actor, producer, and director.

I still don't like this book, and yes those quotes are still way creepy.

...

Those dots stand for the time it took me to get up and check how many separate copies of Pride and Prejudice I currently own.

I counted 7. I may not have caught them all.

That's too many even for someone who's researching Regency England with an eye to setting a novel there (which I am).

I have an entire set of shelves dedicated to books by and about Austen. Not a shelf: an entire bookcase.

Clearly it's time to call the authorities, if you can figure out which authorities deal with this sort of madness.

I have friends who don't enjoy Austen. I have a friend here on GR who specifically dislikes Austen, and she's a former English major who's now a university professor. Of English literature.

I love her comments and reviews, and I love her that much more for having that spot of inexplicability.

Here are three things I think are true:

1. If a book is still in print decades or even centuries after it was published, you don't have to like it. But you should try to understand why it's still around. What does it have to offer, and to whom? Why is this particular title still in print when the vast majority of books ever published die swift and silent deaths? What made this one different? If you can figure this out and still not like the book, you'll have learned something valuable about reading, writing, readers, and writers.

2. If you write something and you ask someone to please read it and tell you what they think, you shouldn't necessarily make all the changes they suggest. Maybe you shouldn't make any of those changes. But you should ask them why they want you to make the changes in question, and you should listen very carefully to their answers. You should understand completely why they're saying what they're saying. And then you should seriously consider their suggestions. Even if you end up throwing each one of those suggestions out the window, you'll have learned something valuable about reading, writing, readers, and writers.

3. If you can't understand even a little bit why people like some things you hate and hate some things you like, you should take a vow of silence (and that includes Internet silence) until you figure out how to live in a world full of people whose opinions are different from yours.

There is some good, even brilliant writing in this book. I can understand why this book is not merely infamous, but loved and admired.

I don't like this book at all, and I sympathize with every person who read the passages about Dunham's sister Grace and said "OH HELL NO."

Those people have a perfectly valid point, and provided they're clear and upfront about how much of this book they read and why it skeeved them out, they're as entitled to post a rating and a review as anyone else is.

For everyone who wondered why I tortured myself reading this book: I've had a lot of these ideas on my mind for some time now, and this particular review seemed like the ideal time to put them together.

For everyone who thinks this doesn't count as a "real" review: deal with it. show less

I enjoyed Not That Kind of Girl a lot - so much I pretty much read it in one sitting. I read 2/3 of the book and was thinking to myself that I cannot relate to anything whatsoever (not the sexcapades, fear of sleeping alone, being assured by a bag full of medicine), but in Part 5, when Lena Dunham talks about her childhood memories of being afraid of death and hypochondria, I felt like I could have written a lot of those things. Same with the part about fitness and health or the lack of it, really. She does talk about a lot of life's challenges and problems in a very easy manner, like they are not a big deal, which I like, otherwise the book would have been quite depressing. I would not categorize it as "humour", though. It is at times show more so cynical and ironic that it seems almost sad, but in a understandable, relatable, been-there-done-that kind of way.

Cannot say I took a lot from the book, which is why I rated it 3/5. show less

Lena Dunham is such a polarizing figure that it would be easy to simply apply any preconceived opinions about her work, good or bad, to this book without actually reading it. On the other hand, once it's been read, it's even easier to connect what she's trying to do here with her work on her show - her particular brand of "uncomfortable self-expression" is inescapably present on every page. Is that a good or a bad thing? Well....

One interesting tendency I've noticed about people writing about negative emotions or conditions like depression, anxiety, sadness, etc., is that they'll inevitably mention something up front along the lines of "how difficult this is to write about", and then they'll immediately proceed to produce really long show more and vividly detailed articles/essays/blog posts. This doesn't seem to happen when people write about more positive emotions, and I thought of a few theories. Perhaps it's because there's something different about negative emotions, that they might be somehow easier to cognitively analyze than positive emotions. Or perhaps unhappy thoughts just translate better to text than to speech, the long sentences and involved paragraphs feeling more natural in writing. Or maybe there's something different about the market for negative emotional products, and people like reading about other people's sad thoughts the way they like hearing sad songs, or if people think that downer conversations belong only to their therapist, but downer journal entries are more publicly palatable in some way.

That tangent came to mind because in terms of feelings expressed per page, this is on balance an extremely unpleasant book - it's much less light-hearted than Girls. Just like in her show, there's a lot of depressing personal interactions, negative situations, regrettable sex, and a permeating sense of failure and of aimless, wasted life. The book has plenty of jokes, but always at the expense of the world, her companions, and above all herself. There's just way more embarrassing material here than on Girls. Read at a brisk clip, it's pretty bleak - the literary equivalent of watching someone pick at their scabs for 200 pages. It's nearly impossible to imagine the person portrayed here being truly happy for most of its length.

This is obviously deliberate - right up front, Dunham tips off that this is supposed to be both a sort of "negative advice manual" and a somewhat fictionalized personal memoir, although it's worth pointing out that the life of the real Lena Dunham (director, author, showrunner on an HBO series while still in her 20s), probably doesn't look much like the grim self-portrait she paints here, despite the painful, intimate detail she goes into in these stories. I've always thought her ability to make her art "critic-proof", in the sense that most criticisms of her show are really dumb and one step behind what she's trying to do, is impressive, and each time I found myself rolling my eyes at her narrative, she found a way to bring me back on the very next page.

One of the great challenges of writing is to depict the mundane without becoming mundane, and thankfully this book meets that challenge for the most part. While occasionally the book's disjointed structure can make it difficult to construct a coherent narrative out of the kaleidescope of bad relationships, worse breakups, and even worse sex she recounts, it's rarely boring, and any Girls fan will instantly warm to her characteristic dissection of the interaction between expectations and embarrassment. I don't think it works as well on the page as it does on the screen, because it feels like the chapters could be written in almost any order and at any given point it feels like she's said her piece several pages ago, but it's certainly worth a read for the hardcore fan. show less

Even though I don’t watch Girls (in fact, I don’t even know which channel it’s aired on in Australia), I can’t help but have heard of Lena Dunham. She’s all over the magazines I read (which are predominantly American) and she writes for them too. I’ve read several essays she’s done for US Glamour and I couldn’t help but be captivated by her witty style combined with the way she just ‘gets it’. She has the uncanny ability to put down perfectly in writing what young women are thinking but don’t always discuss openly from men to sex to career to life in general. Plus, that cover is all too awesome in its homage to the 1970s/1980s books I used to bring home from the library. Will I learn from what Lena’s learned?

The show more first thing I learned on starting to read Not That Kind of Girl is that Lena is mighty funny in the longer essay format coupled with lists of things she’s learned (e.g. from her parents or what’s not okay to say to friends). Underneath the humour though, is a whole big load of truth. What it’s really like not to be a size 6, what it’s like to be a bit different and what navigating friendship, family, men and work is like in your twenties. There’s a lot made of the struggle in high school but it seems that once you reach university and the job market, your worries and concerns are officially over. That life’s a peach. Anyone who has been there knows that is not necessarily the case – friend and relationship issues hit, suddenly you’re part of the work conveyor belt to hell and you’re not meant to feel or have any dramas. Lena gets that and she describes it brilliantly. It’s okay not to have 100% body confidence 100% of the time. You can still eat badly when you’re eating only ‘health’ food. There will be inappropriate situations where you just want to run from the room and hide under a blanket. But there are good times too during this decade – deep friendships and working out who you are. It’s okay to be not that kind of girl. You are the one who decides what kind of girl you are and you have the confidence to tell everyone else to stick it if they don’t like it. Lena’s tone makes it seem like she’s your good buddy, spilling it all.

Some may say that this book is superficial, and perhaps the topics seem that way when compared with global warming, terrorism and everything else bad in this world. But I think if you’re ever doubted yourself, this book might be helpful in showing that this is natural. We all put our best faces out there on Facebook, social media and even in day to day conversation (think about it: when did you last see someone on Facebook showing acne-marked pics while complaining that they put on two kilograms and can’t afford the rent this week). But not every day is 100% positive and I think Not That Kind of Girl celebrates that. Plus, I’m happy to know that I’m not the only person who dislikes camp!

http://samstillreading.wordpress.com show less

In case you haven't heard of her, Lena Dunham is the creator of the HBO Series "Girls". A series I happen to like. A lot.

Somehow, I expected to get the same kind of feelings from the book as I got from the show. A feeling that this person knows what it is really, really like to be young and kinda foolish and isn't afraid to tell the truth about it. The book tells the same kinds of stories, but without the poignancy of the series.

I will say she is very, very frank. Lena reveals pretty much everything about her short life - - the seeing shrinks, doing drugs, the sleeping with guys, the self loathing, the self loving, the drinking, the germ phobias etc. It's all in there. I'm a little bit voyeuristic, so kinda like hearing about this kind show more of stuff. But it also feels a bit disjointed when the writer is twenty five and doesn't actually have the perspective yet to bring meaning to it all.

It was easy and engaging reading. There are a few insightful comments here and there. I laughed a couple of times. If you ever wanted to know what was going on inside the heads of the quirky, offbeat, artsy girls in school . . .here's your chance. Just be forewarned, a few of you are going to be saying "TMI!" by the end. show less