Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
Lena Dunham, 2014
Random House
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812994995
Summary
This hilarious, poignant, and extremely frank collection of personal essays confirms Lena Dunham—the acclaimed creator, producer, and star of HBO’s Girls—as one of the brightest and most original writers working today.
In Not That Kind of Girl, Dunham illuminates the experiences that are part of making one’s way in the world: falling in love, feeling alone, being ten pounds overweight despite eating only health food, having to prove yourself in a room full of men twice your age, finding true love, and most of all, having the guts to believe that your story is one that deserves to be told.
“Take My Virginity (No Really, Take It)” is the account of Dunham’s first time, and how her expectations of sex didn’t quite live up to the actual event (“No floodgate had been opened, no vault of true womanhood unlocked”); “Girls & Jerks” explores her former attraction to less-than-nice guys—guys who had perfected the “dynamic of disrespect” she found so intriguing; “Is This Even Real?” is a meditation on her lifelong obsession with death and dying—what she calls her “genetically predestined morbidity.” And in “I Didn’t F*** Them, but They Yelled at Me,” she imagines the tell-all she will write when she is eighty and past caring, able to reflect honestly on the sexism and condescension she has encountered in Hollywood, where women are “treated like the paper thingies that protect glasses in hotel bathrooms—necessary but infinitely disposable.”
Exuberant, moving, and keenly observed, Not That Kind of Girl is a series of dispatches from the frontlines of the struggle that is growing up. “I’m already predicting my future shame at thinking I had anything to offer you,” Dunham writes. “But if I can take what I’ve learned 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 will have been worthwhile.”(From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 13, 1986
• Where—New York City (Brooklyn), New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College
• Awards—Golden Globe Awards (twice); Directors Guild Award
• Currently—New York City (Brooklyn), New York
Lena Dunham is an American actress, screenwriter, producer, and director. She wrote and directed the independent film Tiny Furniture (2010), and is the creator, writer and star of the HBO series Girls. She has received eight nominations for Emmy Awards as a writer, director, actress and producer and won two Golden Globe Awards for Girls. Dunham is also the first woman to win a Directors Guild Award for Outstanding Director in a Comedy Series.
Background
Dunham was born in New York City, New York. Her father, Carroll Dunham, is a painter, and her mother, Laurie Simmons, is an artist and photographer, and a member of the Pictures group. Laurie is known for her use of dolls and doll-house furniture in her photographs of setup interior scenes. Dunham has described herself as feeling "very culturally Jewish, although that’s the biggest cliche for a Jewish woman to say”; her father is Protestant, and her mother is Jewish.
She has a younger sister, Grace, a 2014 graduate of Brown University, who appeared in Dunham's first film, Creative Nonfiction, and starred in her second film, Tiny Furniture.
Dunham was raised in Brooklyn and spent her summers in a house in Salisbury, Connecticut, though her parents later purchased a weekend family home in Cornwall, Connecticut.
Dunham attended Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, where she met Tiny Furniture actress and Girls co-star Jemima Kirke. She graduated in 2008 from Oberlin College, where she studied creative writing. During her college years, Dunham worked part-time at the West Village boutique Geminola.
Career
Dunham's 2010 feature film Tiny Furniture won Best Narrative Feature at South by Southwest Music and Media Conference, and subsequently screened at such festivals as Maryland Film Festival. Dunham herself plays the lead role of Aura. Her real life mother plays Aura's mother, while her real sister, Grace, plays Aura's on-screen sibling.
In early 2012, HBO gave the go-ahead to Dunham's television series Girls. The first season premiered in April, 2012, and has garnered Dunham four Emmy nominations for her roles in acting, writing, and directing the series and two Golden Globe wins for Best Comedy Series for Girls and for herself in Best Lead Actress in a Comedy or Musical Series. In February 2013, Dunham became the first woman to win a Directors Guild Award for Outstanding Director in a Comedy Series for her work on Girls.
Dunham appeared in a video advertisement promoting President Barack Obama's re-election, delivering a monologue, which, according to a blog quoted in The Atlantic, tried to "get the youth vote by comparing voting for the first time to having sex for the first time". Fox News reported "intense criticism" from multiple media sources, who labeled the advertisement as "tasteless and inappropriate," but added that "not everyone was so offended". In 2014, she was named the Recipient of Horizon Award 2014 by Point Foundation for her support to the gay community.
In 2014 Dunham published a collection of personal essays, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned." She dedicated the book to Nora Ephron, a friend.
Personal life
In 2012, Dunham began dating Jack Antonoff, lead guitarist of the band Fun. She has stated that she will not get married until same-sex marriage is legalized.
Dunham was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder as a child, and continues to take a low dose of an antidepressant to relieve her anxiety. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/4/2014.)
Book Reviews
[S]mart, funny…creator of the critically acclaimed HBO series Girls…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…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…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
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Not That Kind of Girl is familiar fare. Dunham chronicles her attempts to lose her virginity and lose weight. She tells gut-wrenching stories of sex. She gets a job, goes to camp, grapples with a medical diagnosis and experiments with early iterations of technology. When her sister is born, she wails “Intruder! Return Her!” As Nora Ephron said, “everything is copy,” and though such topics are well trodden, Dunham makes them shine.
Michelle Goldberg - New York Times Book Review
[W]itty and wise and rife with the kind of pacing and comedic flourishes that characterize early Woody Allen books.... Dunham is an extraordinary talent, and her vision...is stunningly original
Meghan Daum - New York Times Magazine
There’s a lot of power in retelling your mistakes so people can see what’s funny about them—and so that you are in control. Dunham knows about this power, and she has harnessed it.
Washington Post
A lovely, touching, surprisingly sentimental portrait of a woman who, despite repeatedly baring her body and soul to audiences, remains a bit of an enigma: a young woman who sets the agenda, defies classification and seems utterly at home in her own skin.
Chicago Tribune
Reading this book is a pleasure.... [These essays] exude brilliance and insight well beyond Dunham’s twenty-eight years.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Dunham has crafted warm, intelligent writing that is both deeply personal and engaging. . . . [Hers] is not only a voice who deserves to be heard but also one who will inspire other important voices to tell their stories too.
Roxane Gay - Time
Witty, illuminating, maddening, bracingly bleak . . . That great feminist icon Norman Mailer was very careful, through a lifetime’s work, not to unbury his ‘crystals,’ his prismatic lodes of psychic material: it’s the reason (he claimed) he never wrote an autobiography. Dunham’s crystals are on perpetual display, sending light shafts everywhere. . . . [She’s] a genuine artist, and a disturber of the order.
Atlantic
A lot of us fear we don’t measure up beautywise and that we endure too much crummy treatment from men. On these topics, Dunham is funny, wise, and, yes, brave.... Among Dunham’s gifts to womankind is her frontline example that some asshole may call you undesirable or worse, and it won’t kill you. Your version matters more.
Elle
(Starred review.) Touching, at times profound, and deeply funny . . . Dunham is expert at combining despair and humor.
Publishers Weekly
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Library Journal
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Kirkus Reviews
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