Book 27: Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham

Title: Not That Kind of Girl
Author: Lena Dunham
Length: 262 pages
Year Written: 2014
Why I chose this book: I am a huge fan of Dunham's HBO television series GIRLS. I've always been curious to read the memoirs Hannah is working on in the show, and I imagine that this book is essentially it.

Not That Kind of Girl is only the second non-fiction book I have read this year. However, after reading Lena Dunham blather about her self-centered, vaguely unstable, privileged, prosciutto-eating childhood, and her colorful adult life (that runs virtually parallel to that of the character she plays on GIRLS), you wonder just how reliable of a narrator she really is. At one point in the book, Dunham actually says "I am an unreliable narrator," before proceeding to explain how she retells details about other people's lives as if they were her own—before she even realizes she is lying.

Remember when Hannah's literary agent read her work and asked, "Where's the pudgy face slick with semen and sadness?" It's here, in NTKOG. There's a lot more, though. Behind the pudgy face is what is and always has been a brilliant mind (something Dunham both knows about herself and proves simultaneously). It's clear that Dunham has no qualms about looking or sounding like a jackass, and frequently redeems herself with her special brand of intelligence and wit.

One particularly high point in NTKOG. 

This book reads less like a how-to manual and more like a how-never-to. Never let someone continuously fuck you and fuck with you. Never forget that we are all destined to die. Never underestimate the audacity and spite of a pre-pubescent daughter of crunchy granola types in Brooklyn. Dunham is a piece of work. And she's transformed her life into a pretty entertaining and cleverly written piece of work.

She is morbid, the physical embodiment of the acronym TMI, and her self-deprecating style is as much charming as it is pathetic. I think the moral of the Dunham story is that she doesn't give a fuck. But she really, really does. She wants to make it, to be heard, to have her experiences documented and digested by the new generation. She reminds me that everyone is crazy and unstable. But if you can write about it intelligently and make others laugh while doing so, you've hit the sweet spot. We can't take ourselves so seriously, and it's good to know that Lena is true to her attention-seeking brat of an inner child.

Rating: 8.5/10