Better late than ever, Lena Dunham’s first novel works no less because of its September release. She brings us a memoir that doesn’t require the new millennium to render a relevant, timeless in its timeliness, book we sort of need.
Dunham is neither that kind of girl nor any type of girl that we, an educated people, have seen enough throughout culture or history to file them into a “type” to begin with. She’s also not the voice of a generation, as much as her onscreen persona Hannah (HBO’s “Girls”) would like to contend. She’s just a girl, but a girl unafraid to say the things 20-somethings of her, well, circumstances (read: gender, shape, affluence) won’t. She’s also unafraid to ironically choose pink title letters for the hardcover of her first book, “Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s ‘Learned,’” and to unironically hang quotations marks around the subtitled word “learned,” confessing the very ephemera of her gleanings.
By now, we’ve heard it all — the minimal praise, the diatribes, the diatribes, the diatribes. But Dunham has imported something much more important than vapid troll fodder in her memoir-essays, “Not That Kind of Girl,” a principle so essential as we, the majority, go forward trying on various masks to better fit in: her supreme vulnerability.
I take issue when critics — people supposedly good at expressing passion with dutiful dispassion — mistake Dunham’s vulnerability for pejoratives like “oversharing” or “self-important.” Newsflash: vulnerability can, and often will, offend. Once her candor showers over you, albeit lukewarm at first, her riffs on family and experience are not so blinkered, but rather expansive.
The prose is divided into five not-mutually exclusive segments, from “Love & Sex” and “Body” to “Friendship” and “Work” to “Big Picture.” These cabinets are less for organization and more for Dunham to, with probable irony, “cover all the bases” that a good-girl memoir should.
She opens her introduction, “I am twenty years old and I hate myself,” pegging at the same time her darkest and least relevant line, as the couple hundred pages that follow limn her ultimately upbeat and tough-minded anecdotes and musings. She may have wept during bits of the production process but, now, finished, she seems poised to share some of her dreck bereft of smelly crowd-pleasing, with some chapters markedly weaker than others, notwithstanding.
Her bite-size reflections and sprinkled Nickelodeon-like cartoons not only establish a girlish, journaling aesthetic, but her lexicon is so tempered that, really, a little girl could read it. Not unlike a future Olympic sprinter taking it easy in P.E., Dunham packs punches like, “Jared was friendlier than cool guys are supposed to be,” wholly cognizant of her diction before concerning herself with sounding smart. It seems a tough pill to swallow for a writer so capable of morphing that sentence into A Sentence, in all its erudition.
And her poetics, her unique voice — this is her most invaluable asset. This is also what makes “Not That Kind of Girl” a good read, a read that with cogency connects young women to young men to, maybe if they’re with the times, older people. She intuits much like, selfishly, I did and do: Describing her heated phone conversation with Mom over how she needs her mom “in a different way than before,” Dunham writes, “‘That’s fucking bullshit.’ I can tell she’s in a store.” That hardly recognizable pause between her mother’s words, the light background chatter Dunham discerns, is unexceptional, but opting to include this afterthought, little yet nuclear, plays to Dunham’s advantage all book long.
She’s funny, too, but seldom in a sidesplitting way. Sidesplitting is for punchlines, but her book is by and large without them. She toys with secrets that are strange enough to credibly be hers, like the list of things she’s afraid of at age 8: leprosy, unclean meat, milk, homeless people, foods my mother hasn’t tasted first so that if we die we die together, et al. Whereas Fey and Poehler, and their respective memoirs, are driven by improv-laden, Harvard Lampoon true comedy writing, Dunham is not a trained comic, and her book doesn’t read like one, for the better. Dunham makes you laugh in a to-yourself manner, half-pondering her semi-repressed intellect and half-envying her honest wit, so honest that it’s almost not wit at all.
In her final, appropriately mawkish chapter, called “Guide to Running Away,” Dunham gets the closest to her book’s beating heart. Of her mother, of all of our mothers, I presume, she writes, at age 9, “You are mad at your mother because sometimes she doesn’t pay attention and she says yes to a question that needs a different kind of answer.” Then, in the same vein, but at age 27: “You’re the one who’s distracted while your mother tries to talk. you’re the one who thinks fathers just need to get through their father problems.” Her growth, in mind and body, has manifested but she, as a smart person should, stays skeptical in really knowing anything for certain. She has come this far — with the wounds to prove it — not to create that girl or the girl or even a girl, but rather her girl, heading toward womanhood with all of her idiosyncrasies in tote, including the prickly ones.