Photo from Amazon.com
I was originally drawn to the creative mastermind Lena Dunham because of sex. It was April of 2012, the premiere of her HBO show “Girls,” and I’d never seen sex portrayed so awkwardly, so filthily or so realistically. Who was this modern woman, I wondered, who voluntarily shed her clothes on public television in such a vulnerable yet brash way, not to look alluring but to illuminate the experiences of the modern young adult woman? I wanted to understand her. I wanted to be like her. Her book, “Not that Kind of Girl: a young woman tells you what she’s ‘learned,’” is a collection of short stories, essays, lists and “emails I would send if I were one ounce crazier/angrier/braver.” It is no different in its transparent, sometimes painfully real, account of Dunham’s life experiences than her critically acclaimed show.
There are five sections of the book and, of course, one of them is about sex. Dunham is still the only narrator I encountered who portrays sex in a way that so closely mirrors raw human experience. It’s all there, from the most painful and scarring to the embarrassing and sweet. From her chronic bout with “platonic bed sharing,” to losing her virginity after a strategically planned wine-and-cheese college dorm party with a boy she never talked to again. We learn of her ill-fated instant messaging romance in junior high (and how she felt when her e-lover died), and about the night a boy violated her body without her consent.
There are times when it feels as if Dunham is still figuring out her experiences as she writes, taking the readers along with her through the confusing and terrifying experience of growing up. Throughout the book, Dunham weaves in her relationship with anxiety and other mental disorders in a way that feels accessible, even to those who’ve never experienced these things firsthand. It’s eloquent yet disturbing because we understand how real these struggles will always be for her, and her ability to discuss them redeems it.
Dunham writes in a way that makes me feel as if I have experienced, or will experience, everything she shares. Her stories are told with a raw openness but are tinged with a self-critical eye that reflects a lifelong analysis of her own introspective experience. But all the while, she is funny, she is witty and she is aware of the often ridiculous self-importance we possess as youth.
Though Dunham has been criticized in the media for over-sharing or sounding redundant, I say that in her transparency she makes the muddy world around us a little less opaque. In her redundancy, she adds legitimacy to the most private experiences people share.
In a characteristically self-conflicted introduction, Dunham discusses her apprehensiveness about writing a book centered around herself, how her 80-year-old-self would perhaps look back and scoff at her gusty self-importance. But Dunham says writing about her experiences is a way to keep her sanity intact. And for that I’d like to thank her, because in sharing her quest to protect her sanity (in which she sometimes falls off the track, but never fails), she validates that of her readers.
In her introduction, Dunham says that “if I could 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 was worthwhile.” In the 29 short chapters that follow, Dunham’s stories probably won’t prevent any of those things from happening to her readers, but rather makes the fact that they might happen OK. Because nobody really ever “learns,” but we can absolutely take comfort in the fact that somebody else survived, is on the other side and is now brave enough to tell.
