Lena Dunham is the soon not to be twenty-something uber star of her generation. Her book, much like her TV Show, Girls, is filled to the brim with hip and trendy lingo that helps to add a bit of spice to stories of sex, drugs, and illnesses. She is a fan of footnotes, but they are never where I need them. Her footnotes explain how she was feeling and not what the hell JAP means (best google guess is Jewish American Princess) or what Adderall is supposed to be used for when college kids aren’t getting stoned on the stuff. These are just a couple of examples of the many terms and phrases that had me running to Google while reading Not That Kind of Girl.
She must be a big fan of David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs, as this memoir feels a bit like their work when they can’t get out of thier own heads. It also reminds me a bit of Jeanne Darst’s Fiction Ruined My Family, in that Lean shares Jeanne’s desire to over share, offering up far too much information, and then taking pride in her tales of humiliation as she shakes her head at any provincial fools that don’t find the most trivial details of her life fascinating.
Reading memoirs is fun, but it gives me this kind of writer’s buzz that makes me want to document my own less than exciting life. Because that’s what memoirs are, all the glitz and excitement taken away and long talks about her therapist and her weight loom large. It’s a kind of forced importance to the unimportant. An actual biography of Lena Dunham might have been interesting, whereas her tales of Summer Camp were not.
The bulk of Not That Kind Of Girl details mundane events that could have come from anyone’s life. Minor heartaches, jobs that aren’t that great, parents that don’t understand us, sexual encounters that didn’t live up to our expectations and so on and so forth. Near the end Lena starts talking about work. But even here, she insists on talking about her stint as a Shopgirl as if it has the same importance to her as becoming slightly richer and slightly more famous form making a TV show for HBO.
She mentions her phenomenal success in passing, giving it considerably less time than she gives her school days, camp days, and her interest in death. I’m reminded of a Bill Cosby joke from one of his albums-I was in a Tv Show, it was a hit. And on he went to the next topic. But at least Bill’s stories were funny. Many of Lena’s tales are more cringe worthy than amusing.
The bits about her molesting her little sister and being raped by a Republican where just minor blips to me. A couple more random events that barely held Lena’s attention while she was writing about them.
Not That Kind of Girl had a few fun moments, but overall I wasn’t too impressed.
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