Lena Dunham’s Memoir-ish ‘Not That Kind of Girl’
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Smart, funny women writers love to dispense advice.
Dorothy Parker: “Take care of the luxuries, and the necessities will take care of themselves.” Nora Ephron: “Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from.” Wendy Wasserstein: “Women like us have to learn to give to those who appreciate it instead of to those who expect it.” Tina Fey: “Don’t hire anyone you wouldn’t want to run into in the hallway at 3 in the morning.” And now, Lena Dunham: “Confidence lets you pull anything off, even Tevas with socks.”.....
Smart, funny women writers love to dispense advice.
Dorothy Parker: “Take care of the luxuries, and the necessities will take care of themselves.” Nora Ephron: “Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from.” Wendy Wasserstein: “Women like us have to learn to give to those who appreciate it instead of to those who expect it.” Tina Fey: “Don’t hire anyone you wouldn’t want to run into in the hallway at 3 in the morning.” And now, Lena Dunham: “Confidence lets you pull anything off, even Tevas with socks.”
Ms. Dunham’s smart, funny new book, “Not That Kind of Girl,” is a kind of memoir disguised as an advice book, or a how-to-book (as in how to navigate the perilous waters of girlhood) in the guise of a series of personal essays. “If I could take what I’ve learned,” she writes in the introduction, “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.”
“Not That Kind of Girl,” Ms. Dunham suggests, was partly inspired by Helen Gurley Brown’s 1982 book, “Having It All,” which she found in a thrift shop when she was 20 — a book whose advice she often found “absolutely bananas” (like subsisting on fewer than 1,000 calories a day), but whose essential message (that “a powerful, confident and, yes, even sexy woman could be made, not born”) she says she desperately needed at that time, when she hated herself and thought she would “never amount to anything.”
Only 28 now, Ms. Dunham is the creator of the critically acclaimed HBO series “Girls,” a show based on her experiences in those limbo years between college and grown-up life, when she and her friends were struggling with bad boyfriends, dead-end jobs and elusive dreams. Real and often raw (in contrast to the more candy-colored “Sex and the City”), “Girls” captures those years — at least as experienced by a privileged group of young Brooklynites — when it feels as if life-altering reversals of fortune were occurring several times a day; when wild clothes and self-dramatizing theatrics often cloak loneliness and confusion; when impulsiveness and strenuous navel-gazing tend to be emotional default settings.
With “Not That Kind of Girl,” Ms. Dunham brings a similar candor to the story of her own life, getting as naked in print as her alter ego Hannah often does in the flesh. The sharp observation and distinctive voice she honed in “Girls” and in her 2010 movie, “Tiny Furniture,” are translated to the page. If Nora Ephron (a mentor to Ms. Dunham and one of the people to whom this book is dedicated) came across in her books as your sophisticated, big-city aunt, knowing, worldly and savvy about just about everything, then Ms. Dunham sounds more like your high-strung niece: confiding, nervy and earnest. She is, by turns, acerbic and vulnerable; self-absorbed and searching; boldly in your face and painfully anxious; a survivor of many of the dating and friendship crises experienced by her “Girls” characters, though still flummoxed by the mysteries of adulthood.
Ms. Dunham describes terrible dates and cringe-making email exchanges with self-deprecating humor. She chronicles her doubts and fears and neuroses, her dependence on a therapist (“I’ve called her from beaches, speeding vehicles in Western states, crouched behind a Dumpster, in the parking lot of my college dormitory and from my bedroom 10 blocks from her office”), and her icky sexual encounters with an assortment of jerks. Before meeting her current boyfriend, “a truly kind person,” she says, she was especially attracted to the sort of guy who “starts out rude, explains that it’s a defense mechanism, and then turns even ruder” once you get to know him.
Ms. Dunham clearly has a lot in common with Hannah, including bouts of obsessive-compulsive disorder; a kind of plucky, game-gal resilience in the face of stinging humiliation; a compulsion to translate her experiences into words; and a penchant for pre-emptively cataloging her own flaws before anyone else can.
Her first impulse, like Hannah’s, is to share everything (no matter the “ew” factor), but she also possesses a self-awareness that eludes her fictional alter ego. Ms. Dunham seems to understand that some of her and her friends’ concerns are the sort that young people with fewer options might regard as luxuries — aware that the small planet she and her friends inhabit is both recognizable and New York City-rarefied.
And so, while Hannah, an aspiring author, is constantly putting her foot in her mouth and prattling on about herself, the gifted Ms. Dunham not only writes with observant precision, but also brings a measure of perspective, nostalgia and an older person’s sort of wisdom to her portrait of her (not all that much) younger self and her world.
“I can never be who I was,” she observes. “I can simply watch her with sympathy, understanding and some measure of awe. There she goes, backpack on, headed for the subway or the airport. She did her best with her eyeliner. She learned a new word she wants to try out on you. She is ambling along. She is looking for it.”
In fact, the differences between Ms. Dunham and Hannah help fuel this book. A young woman in search of a comic road map to love and sex and work and “having it all” would hardly benefit from consulting the self-sabotaging Hannah (or, for that matter, Marnie, Jessa or Shoshanna) for advice. But the author of this memoir — that’s another matter. Ms. Dunham doesn’t presume to be “the voice of my generation” or even “a voice of a generation,” as Hannah does in the show. Instead, by simply telling her own story in all its specificity and sometimes embarrassing detail, she has written a book that’s as acute and heartfelt as it is funny.
NOT THAT KIND OF GIRL
A Young Woman Tells You What She’s ‘Learned’
By Lena Dunham
Illustrated. 265 pages. Random House. $28.
Correction: September 23, 2014
An earlier version of this review rendered a quotation from “Not That Kind of Girl” incorrectly. In describing men she was formerly attracted to, Lena Dunham referred to the kind who “starts out rude, explains that it’s a defense mechanism, and then turns even ruder,” not “and then turns ever ruder.”
Dorothy Parker: “Take care of the luxuries, and the necessities will take care of themselves.” Nora Ephron: “Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from.” Wendy Wasserstein: “Women like us have to learn to give to those who appreciate it instead of to those who expect it.” Tina Fey: “Don’t hire anyone you wouldn’t want to run into in the hallway at 3 in the morning.” And now, Lena Dunham: “Confidence lets you pull anything off, even Tevas with socks.”
Ms. Dunham’s smart, funny new book, “Not That Kind of Girl,” is a kind of memoir disguised as an advice book, or a how-to-book (as in how to navigate the perilous waters of girlhood) in the guise of a series of personal essays. “If I could take what I’ve learned,” she writes in the introduction, “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.”
“Not That Kind of Girl,” Ms. Dunham suggests, was partly inspired by Helen Gurley Brown’s 1982 book, “Having It All,” which she found in a thrift shop when she was 20 — a book whose advice she often found “absolutely bananas” (like subsisting on fewer than 1,000 calories a day), but whose essential message (that “a powerful, confident and, yes, even sexy woman could be made, not born”) she says she desperately needed at that time, when she hated herself and thought she would “never amount to anything.”
Only 28 now, Ms. Dunham is the creator of the critically acclaimed HBO series “Girls,” a show based on her experiences in those limbo years between college and grown-up life, when she and her friends were struggling with bad boyfriends, dead-end jobs and elusive dreams. Real and often raw (in contrast to the more candy-colored “Sex and the City”), “Girls” captures those years — at least as experienced by a privileged group of young Brooklynites — when it feels as if life-altering reversals of fortune were occurring several times a day; when wild clothes and self-dramatizing theatrics often cloak loneliness and confusion; when impulsiveness and strenuous navel-gazing tend to be emotional default settings.
With “Not That Kind of Girl,” Ms. Dunham brings a similar candor to the story of her own life, getting as naked in print as her alter ego Hannah often does in the flesh. The sharp observation and distinctive voice she honed in “Girls” and in her 2010 movie, “Tiny Furniture,” are translated to the page. If Nora Ephron (a mentor to Ms. Dunham and one of the people to whom this book is dedicated) came across in her books as your sophisticated, big-city aunt, knowing, worldly and savvy about just about everything, then Ms. Dunham sounds more like your high-strung niece: confiding, nervy and earnest. She is, by turns, acerbic and vulnerable; self-absorbed and searching; boldly in your face and painfully anxious; a survivor of many of the dating and friendship crises experienced by her “Girls” characters, though still flummoxed by the mysteries of adulthood.
Ms. Dunham describes terrible dates and cringe-making email exchanges with self-deprecating humor. She chronicles her doubts and fears and neuroses, her dependence on a therapist (“I’ve called her from beaches, speeding vehicles in Western states, crouched behind a Dumpster, in the parking lot of my college dormitory and from my bedroom 10 blocks from her office”), and her icky sexual encounters with an assortment of jerks. Before meeting her current boyfriend, “a truly kind person,” she says, she was especially attracted to the sort of guy who “starts out rude, explains that it’s a defense mechanism, and then turns even ruder” once you get to know him.
Ms. Dunham clearly has a lot in common with Hannah, including bouts of obsessive-compulsive disorder; a kind of plucky, game-gal resilience in the face of stinging humiliation; a compulsion to translate her experiences into words; and a penchant for pre-emptively cataloging her own flaws before anyone else can.
Her first impulse, like Hannah’s, is to share everything (no matter the “ew” factor), but she also possesses a self-awareness that eludes her fictional alter ego. Ms. Dunham seems to understand that some of her and her friends’ concerns are the sort that young people with fewer options might regard as luxuries — aware that the small planet she and her friends inhabit is both recognizable and New York City-rarefied.
And so, while Hannah, an aspiring author, is constantly putting her foot in her mouth and prattling on about herself, the gifted Ms. Dunham not only writes with observant precision, but also brings a measure of perspective, nostalgia and an older person’s sort of wisdom to her portrait of her (not all that much) younger self and her world.
“I can never be who I was,” she observes. “I can simply watch her with sympathy, understanding and some measure of awe. There she goes, backpack on, headed for the subway or the airport. She did her best with her eyeliner. She learned a new word she wants to try out on you. She is ambling along. She is looking for it.”
In fact, the differences between Ms. Dunham and Hannah help fuel this book. A young woman in search of a comic road map to love and sex and work and “having it all” would hardly benefit from consulting the self-sabotaging Hannah (or, for that matter, Marnie, Jessa or Shoshanna) for advice. But the author of this memoir — that’s another matter. Ms. Dunham doesn’t presume to be “the voice of my generation” or even “a voice of a generation,” as Hannah does in the show. Instead, by simply telling her own story in all its specificity and sometimes embarrassing detail, she has written a book that’s as acute and heartfelt as it is funny.
NOT THAT KIND OF GIRL
A Young Woman Tells You What She’s ‘Learned’
By Lena Dunham
Illustrated. 265 pages. Random House. $28.
Correction: September 23, 2014
An earlier version of this review rendered a quotation from “Not That Kind of Girl” incorrectly. In describing men she was formerly attracted to, Lena Dunham referred to the kind who “starts out rude, explains that it’s a defense mechanism, and then turns even ruder,” not “and then turns ever ruder.”