Thoughts On: Lena Dunham's Not That Kind Of Girl

I'm a big GIRLS fan, but I wasn't all that bothered about reading Lena Dunham's new book when it was released. It turned out to be hard to avoid the hype around it, and curiousity got the better of me, so I downloaded it for a little light tube reading. It seemed that everyone left right and center was singing it's praises, so I didn't have any reservations about parting with five whole pounds for it.

I feel like I should point out before I start that I do like Lena Dunham, and I like that people are standing up and taking notice of her. We seem to have created some kind of ballsy feminist role model out of her, and that's something we probably need. She may not be the best choice, but it's a step in the right direction that's for sure. I love that she speaks her mind, there's still this idea that women should be proper and diplomatic all the time, and sometimes we need someone to stand up and trash that idea.

The book itself is kind of a collection of essays, covering subjects from sex to body image, and talking about events from Dunham's earliest childhood recollections, right up to more recent happenings. The whole tone of the book reflects everything I've come to expect from her, it's apologetically honest, crude, shocking, and if I'm honest, at times a little unnecessary.

It took me a really long time to get into this book, it just didn't grab me from the start. I found that I'd pick it up and read two or three pages and then loose interest. I love reading, and this rarely happens to me, I'm usually pretty good at sticking with books even when they're slow to get going. For me, part of the problem with this book was that I kinda felt like a lot of the language was unnecessary, like she was saying ten words where she could say two, and like she'd swallowed a thesaurus before getting started. I like an intelligent vocabulary, but it kinda felt unnecessary in this context, and it made it a bit of a chore to read.

I got about of the third of the way through reading a couple of pages at a time, until one evening I decided to just power through, and read the rest. And while it wasn't a bad read per se, I just wasn't impressed.

Dunham touches on a lot of issues that should be relatable for women, she talks about being a, in her own words, strange child. she talks about issues of anxiety, and sexual exploration, and body image, and essentially, what it's like to be a young woman trying to find herself. Which is great, but nothing that she said seemed that relatable to me. A lot of the content seemed like it had been included for no reason at all other than to shock the reader, which isn't really the best way to go about creating a book if you ask me. Stories seemed unnecessarily crude and dramatised, and maybe this is how it all happened, but it just didn't feel that way, it felt more like an awkward device that was being used to shock the reader.

There has been a lot of controversy around a section of the book where Dunham talks about herself as a seven year old, and some of the extremists out there decided to describe Dunham's actions as 'sexual abuse'. I don't want to go into too much detail about the specific passage, but I didn't read this section and think that at all. I thought it was a little strange, but that was about it. There are enough children in my family for me to know that kids go through this phase of being obsessed with genitals and toilet humour, it's part of learning, and whilst it can be awkward and at times, slightly inappropriate, it's normal, and to suggest that Dunham sexually abused her sister seemed as over the top as some of the passages in the book.

This passage aside, I like the idea of what Dunham tried to do here, tell stories in a different way that should be relatable, and in some ways she does make some really interesting observations about life and growing up, but for the most part I just found the whole book awkward and clunky, and not all that enjoyable to read.

I'd love to hear what you guys thought, because I know a lot of people loved this book, do you disagree with me massively?