Lena DunhamCritiques

The writing itself was better than I thought it might be, but it's still pretty self indulgent.

I think I waited too long to read this. If I had read it in my 20’s I probably would have related to it on a personal level and given it five stars. That being said, I think it would be interesting to see a follow up after a few more years of “learning”

If you're looking for an honest book, here it is.

Best line: "The end never comes when you think it will. It's always ten steps past the worst moment, then a weird turn to the left."

Seems like this should have been titled Exactly That Kind of Girl. It reads like the celebrity profile of a young woman who grew up in a privileged position, rich and cared for so much that her parents could afford to send her to a therapist when she was a kid. The author seems preoccupied with herself, without much regard for the outside world. She's under the impression that she is surrounded by people who are untroubled, oblivious to their mortality or their public image. If you watch Girls and enjoy how self-absorbed and entitled the Hannah Horvath character is, inflating her own issues and degrading others', go ahead and read these essays. If you like reading celebrity profiles in magazines, then this one goes into too much detail for you. If you're a female or male who's been through college, pick something else to read because nothing new about your young years can be learned from Not That Kind of Girl.

You gotta be very much into Lena to appreciate this book. Overall, it's mostly funny, but it's not a must read for anyone. Get it if you already know you'll like certain details of Lena's life, otherwise you can safely skip it.

In case you haven't heard of her, Lena Dunham is the creator of the HBO Series "Girls". A series I happen to like. A lot.

Somehow, I expected to get the same kind of feelings from the book as I got from the show. A feeling that this person knows what it is really, really like to be young and kinda foolish and isn't afraid to tell the truth about it. The book tells the same kinds of stories, but without the poignancy of the series.

I will say she is very, very frank. Lena reveals pretty much everything about her short life - - the seeing shrinks, doing drugs, the sleeping with guys, the self loathing, the self loving, the drinking, the germ phobias etc. It's all in there. I'm a little bit voyeuristic, so kinda like hearing about this kind of stuff. But it also feels a bit disjointed when the writer is twenty five and doesn't actually have the perspective yet to bring meaning to it all.

It was easy and engaging reading. There are a few insightful comments here and there. I laughed a couple of times. If you ever wanted to know what was going on inside the heads of the quirky, offbeat, artsy girls in school . . .here's your chance. Just be forewarned, a few of you are going to be saying "TMI!" by the end.

I didn't think this was very good - felt like it was phoning it in and was quite dull whilst trying to be outrageous.

I found myself liking Lena Dunham immensely. Funny, sharp and conflicted, this is the kind of girl you want to call over for a feminist girls' pajama party. She's really fabulous. More power to her.

I think reading this was probably like experiencing art school.

I thought this was pretty good at first, but it quickly becomes repetitive and dull. It reads like something that is supposed to sound cool and clever but it isn’t either, worse still it’s often boring and rarely funny.
To give you an example of how self indulgent and awful it can be there’s one section where Dunham spends pages and pages listing her food diary from years ago, for no discernible reason.

Just as kookie, interesting, and neurotic as the TV series, GIRLS, Dunham tells her tales with no-holds-barred honesty and insight. At times laugh out loud funny and other times incredibly sad, this memoir was an easy week read that left me feeling lucky to be almost normal.

I was planning to be generous and give it 3 stars at least even if it wouldn't blow my mind, but after the first half I just progressively liked it less and less with every passing minute and honestly couldn't wait for it to be over.
It really should have been a blog, not a book, because the things she writes about, they are very self-centered and can be of significance only to Lena herself and maybe to her closest circle of friends with the same privileged upper middle class background.

I appreciated her candidness, and there were many great points.

Lena Dunham is such a polarizing figure that it would be easy to simply apply any preconceived opinions about her work, good or bad, to this book without actually reading it. On the other hand, once it's been read, it's even easier to connect what she's trying to do here with her work on her show - her particular brand of "uncomfortable self-expression" is inescapably present on every page. Is that a good or a bad thing? Well....

One interesting tendency I've noticed about people writing about negative emotions or conditions like depression, anxiety, sadness, etc., is that they'll inevitably mention something up front along the lines of "how difficult this is to write about", and then they'll immediately proceed to produce really long and vividly detailed articles/essays/blog posts. This doesn't seem to happen when people write about more positive emotions, and I thought of a few theories. Perhaps it's because there's something different about negative emotions, that they might be somehow easier to cognitively analyze than positive emotions. Or perhaps unhappy thoughts just translate better to text than to speech, the long sentences and involved paragraphs feeling more natural in writing. Or maybe there's something different about the market for negative emotional products, and people like reading about other people's sad thoughts the way they like hearing sad songs, or if people think that downer conversations belong only to their therapist, but downer journal entries are more publicly palatable in some way.

That tangent came to mind because in terms of feelings expressed per page, this is on balance an extremely unpleasant book - it's much less light-hearted than Girls. Just like in her show, there's a lot of depressing personal interactions, negative situations, regrettable sex, and a permeating sense of failure and of aimless, wasted life. The book has plenty of jokes, but always at the expense of the world, her companions, and above all herself. There's just way more embarrassing material here than on Girls. Read at a brisk clip, it's pretty bleak - the literary equivalent of watching someone pick at their scabs for 200 pages. It's nearly impossible to imagine the person portrayed here being truly happy for most of its length.

This is obviously deliberate - right up front, Dunham tips off that this is supposed to be both a sort of "negative advice manual" and a somewhat fictionalized personal memoir, although it's worth pointing out that the life of the real Lena Dunham (director, author, showrunner on an HBO series while still in her 20s), probably doesn't look much like the grim self-portrait she paints here, despite the painful, intimate detail she goes into in these stories. I've always thought her ability to make her art "critic-proof", in the sense that most criticisms of her show are really dumb and one step behind what she's trying to do, is impressive, and each time I found myself rolling my eyes at her narrative, she found a way to bring me back on the very next page.

One of the great challenges of writing is to depict the mundane without becoming mundane, and thankfully this book meets that challenge for the most part. While occasionally the book's disjointed structure can make it difficult to construct a coherent narrative out of the kaleidescope of bad relationships, worse breakups, and even worse sex she recounts, it's rarely boring, and any Girls fan will instantly warm to her characteristic dissection of the interaction between expectations and embarrassment. I don't think it works as well on the page as it does on the screen, because it feels like the chapters could be written in almost any order and at any given point it feels like she's said her piece several pages ago, but it's certainly worth a read for the hardcore fan.

If you're a fan of "Girls" you'll devour this autobiographical collection of essays. But if you can't handle the Lena truth, it's not for you. If you can, it will probably have you thinking 'how scarily real' one moment and laughing out loud the next. I think she's genius.

So, I've never watched an episode of Girls. I only watched Tiny Furniture after putting this book on hold at the library. So it probably wasn't the brightest idea to expose myself to Lena Dunham and her brand of humor via the medium she has not chosen to regularly express herself. Maybe I would have found Girls interesting...but maybe not so much now that I've read her book now? I don't know.

It just wasn't very interesting. And maybe it would have been if I had been a fan. I giggled a few times, but overall, there's just nothing very relatable here.

This books is mostly like a count-down of things that Dunham's done or not done, things she cries about and decries; her style of writing is very western, in the sense that she's a privileged person who has her neuroses, much like a modern-day Woody Allen in her way.

Basically, any paragraph from this book works as a reference to how Dunham writes. For example:

You wouldn’t know it to see me at a party. In a crowd I am recklessly cheerful, dressed to the nines in thrift-shop gowns and press-on fingernails, fighting the sleepiness that comes from the 350 milligrams of medication I take every night. I dance the hardest, laugh the hardest at my own jokes, and make casual reference to my vagina, like it’s a car or a chest of drawers. I got mono last year, but it never really went away.

A line like the following is interesting:

He had the severe face and impossibly great hair of Alain Delon but said “wicked” more than most French New Wave actors.

I mean, it's like a stream-of-consciousness way of looking into Dunham's head but I'm slightly irritated by the anecdote itself. I can't really explain it. It's just me.

Other times, I think her style works very well (for me):

There was a particularly raucous party in the loft above the video store. I wore Audrey’s fancy wrap dress, and we drank two beers each before we left and split a Xanax she still had from a flight to Boca with her grandma. It hit me hard and fast, and by the time we showed up I was possessed by a party spirit quite alien to me. Audrey, on the other hand, became dizzy and after much deliberation went home, making me promise to treat her wrap dress with the proper respect. I missed her keenly for a moment, then snorted a small amount of cocaine off a key, before kissing a freshman and dancing into the bathroom line, where I showed people how easily Audrey’s wrap dress opened and explained how “bogus” the creative writing department was.

I love her TV series "Girls", and this book kind of hammers in the sensitivites of the series in a good way, while being prolix and slightly too nagging for my taste. Apart from that, I must say that Duhham throws a lot of insight into her daily thoughts, her sexuality and everyday ways, fears and emotions, which I seldom see. I can get really bothered with her nagging, but her insight makes this book almost a complement to Tina Fey's "Bossypants", as written by somebody who's along the same walk of life as Dunham, but older and perhaps wiser.

I also like Dunham's way of responding to people thinking she's "brave" for revealing her body on screen:

And my mother always knew that, hence her Nikon raised high and pointed right into the mirror. She sensed that by documenting her own body, she was preserving her history. Beautifully. Nakedly. Imperfectly. Her private experiment made way for my public one. Another frequently asked question is how I am “brave” enough to reveal my body on-screen. The subtext there is definitely how am I brave enough to reveal my imperfect body, since I doubt Blake Lively would be subject to the same line of inquiry. I am forced to engage in regular conversation about my body with strangers, such as the drunken frat boy on MacDougal Street who shouted, “Your tits look like my sister’s!” My answer is: It’s not brave to do something that doesn’t scare you. I’d be brave to skydive. To visit a leper colony. To argue a case in the United States Supreme Court or to go to a CrossFit gym. Performing in sex scenes that I direct, exposing a flash of my weird puffy nipple, those things don’t fall into my zone of terror. A few years ago, after I screened Tiny Furniture for the first time, I was standing outside the theater in Austin when a teenage boy approached me. He was tiny. Really tiny. The kind of tiny that, as a teenage boy, must be painful. He looked like a Persian cat’s toy mouse. “Excuse me,” he said shyly. “I just wanted you to know how much it meant to me to see you show your body in that way. It made me feel so much better about myself.” The first result of this was that I pictured him naked, which was stressful. The second was extreme gratitude: for his generosity in sharing, for my ability to have any impact on the body image of this obviously cool and open young gentleman (after all, he was seeing a fringe women’s-interest film on a school night). “Thank you so much.” I beamed. “You’re really hot.”

And I do love the complain-with-your-friends bits at times:

We often spent Isabel’s lunch break in Pecan, a local coffee bar where we disturbed yuppies on laptops with our incessant—and filthy—chatter. “I can’t find a goddamn fucking job and I’m too fat to be a stripper,” I said as I polished off a stale croissant.

This book's funny and entertaining.

Sinopsis de editorial Planeta:
Lena Dunham, la aclamada creadora, productora y protagonista de la serie Girls, nos sorprende con una divertidísima, sabia y honesta colección de reflexiones personales que la convierte en una de las escritoras jóvenes con más talento del momento. En No soy ese tipo de chica Dunham habla de aquellas experiencias que hacen de nosotros lo que somos: enamorarse, sentirse solo, pesar cinco kilos de más, hablar en una sala llena de hombre que te doblan la edad, mantener a las buenas amigas, deshacerse de los novios nocivos, encontrar el amor verdadero y, por encima de todo, tener el valor de creer que tu historia merece ser contada.

Dunham cuenta sin tapujos su primera vez y cómo sus expectativas sexuales no encajaron con el acto en sí. También expora su tendencia a sentirse atraída hacia hombres que no le convienen, nos regala una profunda reflexión sobre su obsesión con la muerte e, incluso, imagina el libro que escribirá cuando tenga ochenta años y ya no le importe hablar del sexismo y la condescendencia que imperan en Hollywood.

I'm not a Lena Dunham fan, but I thought I'd give her book a chance anyway. I wish I hadn't.

My feelings on this are mixed. On one hand I love that Lena puts out there things that I have also thought/done/said. I think it's important that women are reflected honestly in society, and that means even the less than perfect bits. Body image, sex, insecurities - it's brave for a woman to unashamedly own her realness. I know that's kind of her thing though, so maybe it isn't as brave for her when it's part of her brand. But it's still very exciting to me. But then on the other hand Lena has lead a life I can't fully relate to, one of connections and money and certain opportunities. And it isn't jealousy that stops me engaging with that, but something else...maybe just plain dislike. I don't know, but I did find some parts a bit of a turn off. I enjoyed it for what it was, laughed and nodded along with quite a lot of it, but I can see why other people really didn't like it. Though I don't understand this need for people to make her a scapegoat for the (appalling) under representation of POC in art. Yes, her show has contributed to it, but it's a very small fish in a whopping great big ocean and I don't think it means the other things she has to say are not valid. One voice can't say everything, and there are ways to open the eyes of those in the position to make changes without attacking that person.

I found it hard to follow along at times, like it just jumped from one story to a different one and back.

I wanted to love this but found myself underwhelmed for the majority of the book. perhaps I built it up too much prior to the release. I might be back for a proper review but for now I'll leave this placeholder.

Had to put her name in the tags because it's so much Lena Dunham - in fact, if you're a fan of the TV show (as I am), that says it all. I loved this book except for the chapters that were lists - fillers, in other words. Her writing is so direct and honest - as someone who's nude on TV a lot would have to write I guess. The parts about her anxiety were riveting and painful.

So it would be a 5 except for the lists.½

Okay, as a feminist I really wanted to luuuuv this book. You know Lena Dunham being a pillar in post-feminist culture and all. But truth be told, I think I just read the diary of a self-involved young woman who continuously seems to blame society for not accepting her sometimes eccentric and erratic behavior in mundane situations. The hyper awareness in each moment was almost physically stressful to me as a reader, which I guess was her goal. The book was an easy and fast read. It was honestly fascinating to peak into Dunham's head for a minute. I could not live there.

A funny and authentic voice of one of the young generation women, who want to be themselves. It made me understand my daughter of 21 better.