Reading Not That Kind of Girl reminded me of slumber parties growing up.
After eating way too much ice cream and watching a sappy chick flick, us girls would often sit around, talking late into the night, baring all our secrets to an eager huddle of female listeners. Often the conversations would turn to boys, romance, body image, and other bits of gossip. It was the sort of salacious conversation that left you feeling very aware of each person’s temptations, weaknesses, and vices: you yourself often also felt flayed open, each of your secret dreams and desires exposed to the group. It was a feeling of intimacy and vulnerability that was often also sickening—because you realized, come the morning, that these girls were not your bosom pals. And there’s a nauseating feeling that accompanies that much openness and disclosure to the anonymous, the acquaintance, the distant friend.
I wonder if Lena Dunham has experienced this feeling; it could be something that most celebrities overcome, seeing that they’re so constantly in the spotlight. Dunham rarely seems to feel any sort of abashment, either in interviews, on social media, or in her HBO series Girls. In this sense, I think, she is a good representative for the millennial generation: it seems that one of the things they prize, above all else, is transparency—the sort of openness that means baring your soul to the entire world, as if it’s a giant slumber party. This is exactly what Dunham has done with Not That Kind of Girl.
The book is divided into five sections. The first, “Love & Sex,” talks about, well, love and sex. In depth. It’s Dunham’s explicitly-detailed chronicling of pretty much every relationship she’s ever had: the ups and downs, the sex and “Platonic bed sharing,” the character quirks and inner struggles. Some parts are—honestly—a bit boring. I don’t mind a girl sharing lessons she’s learned from various relationships throughout her life, but Dunham seems to think that her every sexual experience is worth sharing.
The best chapter of the section is “Girls & Jerks,” in which Dunham explains that she’s always been attracted to “jerks”: men who have “a bad attitude upon first meeting and a desire to teach me a lesson.” I think the tendency Dunham recognizes in herself is one that many other young women also struggle with: a propensity to be attracted to abusive or unkind men. Who knows whether this tendency comes from childhood circumstances, literature, poor male examples, or other factors. But as Dunham warns at the end of the chapter, “Being treated like shit is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment. It’s something you accept, condone, and learn to believe you deserve.” Dunham then adds, “When we embark on intimate relationships, we make a basic human promise to be decent, to hold a flattering mirror up to each other, to be respectful as we explore each other.” It’s a nugget of thoughtful analysis, amidst the swirl of diary-style divulging.
Section II of the book is titled “Body,” and it’s Dunham’s record of various body image struggles and health issues. Not surprisingly, much of this section also revolves around sex and relationships. She talks about diets and her uterus, getting naked on camera and her mother’s nude selfies. The point of this section is, it seems, to show that Dunham is 1) flamboyantly comfortable with her body, and 2) very honest about her past struggles with body image and self-control. She has some wisdom here for women who struggle with self-confidence—but it seems that Dunham only offers two extremes: self-deprecation, or a self-exposure so extreme, it involves nude sex on television. Surely there’s a confidence that can rest comfortably in the middle?
Section III of Dunham’s book is titled “Friendship.” But—surprise—the first couple chapters are mostly about sex and relationships. The third chapter is about Dunham’s sister Grace, and parts of it are very sweet and interesting. I wish she’d given more narrative detail to her family relationships, in general. But the real meat of Dunham’s friendship adventures don’t come until the “Work” section—understandably, since her closest friendships were also the ones that led her to create Delusional Downtown Divas, a show that she and her friends wrote, directed, and acted. Much of this chapter, too, is about sex and relationships, especially as Dunham’s career begins to blossom. One of the chapters, titled “I Didn’t F*** Them, but They Yelled at Me,” contains many barely-disguised jabs at the filmmakers of the Hollywood industry: men who didn’t take Dunham seriously as a director. She doesn’t share names, but calls them the “Sunshine Stealers”: “men who have been at it a little too long, who are tired of the ride but can’t get off. They’re looking for some new form of energy, of approval.” These are, perhaps, the anti-Dunham types: men content with the societal status quo, good at hiding their real selves from the world’s eyes.
The book’s final section is titled “Big Picture,” and it was the most interesting and truly personal of Dunham’s book (partly because it was less focused on sex and relationships, and more focused on the big questions and struggles of life). Dunham shares her struggles with OCD, with a fear of death and a sense of separation from her body, a terror over the unknown. “As a little kid, an unnamed fear would often overtake me,” she writes. “It wasn’t a fear of anything tangible… the feeling was cold and resided just below my stomach. It made everything around me seem unreal and unsafe.” Dunham offers an honest, bare-eyed look at death and the unknown that is refreshing. She, like John Green (whose nihilistic yet forthright approach to death I’ve written about before), seems to have a healthy and earnest desire to understand death, or—if not to understand it—at least to look bravely at its stark reality. She admits that she knows nothing about death, “but I also hope that future me will be proud of present me for trying to wrap my head around the big ideas and also for trying to make you feel like we’re all in this together.”
Elisa Strauss is right when she writes of Dunham, “Dunham’s commitment to the lives of young women is a radical and important act, testifying to the fact that the stories of young women—yes, even your average, privileged ones—matter.”
This is true. Ordinary stories matter. Women’s stories matter. But in the telling of any story, the narrative arc and deeper message ought to shine through the ordinary. And here, Dunham’s exhibitionism seems to clutter and hide both, to a degree. Writers must consider the limits of their narrative, must consider how much is too much. Dunham could have done a better job cutting the mundane and the sensational, to let the deeper messages—of self-worth, individuality, creativity, friendship, and family—shine through. One wishes that Dunham didn’t put so much stock in sex and relationships, that these stories weren’t given quite the prominence in her narrative that they receive. It’s not that these things aren’t important—but they can distract from the deeper traits and quirks that make up a person’s character and life story.
Dunham would probably disagree—as she complained to NPR in an interview, “I think when men share their experiences, it’s bravery and when women share their experiences, it’s some sort of—people are like, ‘TMI.’”
But I don’t think this is entirely true: I think certain men also “over-share,” and get rebuked for it. James Franco’s self-pretentiousness and quasi-artistry is perhaps a good example of this—critics don’t let him get away with thinking he’s wiser or more talented than he is. Literary criticism is about weighing whether the experiences someone shares are good—whether they offer too much or too little, whether they elicit genuine feeling or a façade of authenticity.
I believe Dunham is genuine—if somewhat self-consciously so at times. It’s not that she means to be pretentious or self-aggrandizing, necessarily, but the very act of writing a book about yourself makes you conscious of your genuineness. It’s like the average Twitter or Facebook status: a translating of genuine experience and/or feeling into the proper tone and style, structured to fit one’s artistic façade, aiming to garner “likes” and “favorites” from fans and friends. It’s the way most millennials share their experiences, these days.
“In some ways, I share for a living,” Dunham says in a Buzzfeed interview. But she adds, “There are things I will only share with a true friend. There are parts of my life you know about that aren’t in the book and aren’t in my show.” If there are, it’s hard to imagine what they might be. Exhibitionism seems to be Dunham’s primary mode of existence. Is it a sign of immaturity, as The Daily Beast’s Emily Shire suggests? Or is it—as Rebecca Mead seems to suggest in The New Yorker—her own brand of artistry? Mead writes,
Dunham’s generation has, thanks to the Internet, surrendered its privacy to an unprecedented degree, and she is less private than most: she kept an old-fashioned journal once, but abandoned it. “I was, like, ‘What’s the point, if no one’s reading it?’” … Tiny Furniture is, in some sense, a diary left open on the counter: Dunham really did break up with her college boyfriend just after graduating, really did work a day shift in a restaurant, and really does live in her parents’ loft. But the movie is also a clever distortion of reality, in which Dunham, for comic effect, rehearses only the most pathetic aspects of her life. … Dunham’s willingness to show herself at her most vulnerable is a source of creative strength.
Perhaps Dunham is both: immature and spoiled, to an extent, but also a model of her generation, an artist who isn’t afraid to be self-deprecating in order to be novel.
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