Not That Kind of Girl
By Lena Dunham. Doubleday Canada, 265 pp, hardcover

Lena Dunham was born in 1986 and didn’t start her artistic career until 2010, so a question of “experience” is expected when it comes to her memoir. The actor, writer, director, and producer recently added “author” to her list of titles with Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned”. Dunham’s first book does tell her life’s stories; however, it’s not a traditional memoir but rather a collection of essays recounting Dunham’s experiences of sex, friendships, career, and family in her 28 years on earth.

Many readers will pick up the book because of Dunham’s association with Girls. The hit HBO television series debuted in 2012, and very quickly Dunham became a household name among millennials. As her character Hannah Horvath announced in the show’s very first episode, Dunham was indeed “a voice of a generation”.

In a generation where celebrity and success can be measured in Twitter followers—of which Dunham has upward of 1.8 million—it isn’t all that surprising that Random House offered the actor a $3.5 million book deal just six months after Girls’ debut.

In some ways, Not That Kind of Girl is an extension not only of Dunham, but ofHannah Horvath as well. For readers familiar with the show, disambiguating the voice behind the book’s stories is sometimes difficult.

On Girls, Dunham portrays a young, upwardly mobile woman learning to navigate relationships, friendships, work, and sex as a recent college grad in New York. The Dunham that comes through in Not That Kind of Girl is similar to Hannah—precocious yet clumsy, outspoken and inappropriate at times, young and relatable. Both women also seem to possess a sense of confidence and self-importance that feels refreshing, not obnoxious.

The first section of essays deals with love and sex. In typical Dunham fashion, the author writes frankly and dives right in. The opening sentence of “Take My Virginity (No, Really, Take It)” reads: “When I was nine, I wrote a vow of celibacy on a piece of paper and ate it.”

The six pages that follow tell the story of how Dunham was determined to have sex for the first time during her sophomore year at Oberlin College. She met a boy named Jonah, who dressed “vaguely like a middle-aged lesbian” in the school cafeteria and decided that throwing a party in her dorm room would be the best way to seduce him. Almost every essay ends with what was learned—in this case, that in the grand scheme of things, losing one’s virginity is rather inconsequential.

A few chapters later, in a section called “Body”, Dunham documents her failed attempts at dieting, describes what it’s really like to film nude scenes and sex scenes, and even manages to find comedy in endometriosis. Around three-dozen essays—although the word essay is used loosely, since several of the chapters are simply two- or three-page lists, such as “13 Things I’ve Learned Are Not Okay to Say to Friends”—fill out the remaining sections detailing friendship, work, and “big picture” thoughts.

Of all the stories, one in particular stands out. Early on in the book, in a chapter titled “Barry”, Dunham reveals a time when she was raped. The incident occurred when she was in college, and years passed before she fully came to terms with the trauma. Even so, there is a dry humour that rings throughout and a sense that this public confession is another way to make sense of what happened.

In all of the essays, really, Dunham is divulging thoughts, feelings, and encounters shared by many young people today. Similar to Girls, whose success is predicated on its relatability to millennials, Not That Kind of Girl feels like a collective experience in many ways.

Dunham writes in the introduction, “There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman.” This is true, whether Dunham relates that through Hannah Horvath on Girls, through 140-character tweets, or in a book.