Taylor Hanigosky
tmh004@marietta.edu
Here’s the deal: I’m not going to be snide and pretend I am under no influence of Ms. Lena Dunham. Her witty allure; her stick-it-to-the-man disposition; her unrivaled knack for rousing relatable emotions, regrets and anxieties. She’s the voice of our generation, or at least, “a voice of a generation,” as Dunham’s alter ego Hannah Horvath quips in the pilot episode of HBO’s “Girls.” In the hit TV show, Dunham details the musings and misfortunes of a band of privileged twenty-somethings in New York, igniting her popularity like a wildfire.
If you’ve entered the inter-web in the last year or so, you’ve likely heard her name. Even more likely, you’ve heard her critics. Faultfinders of Lena Dunham are numerous, opposed to everything from her upbringing as the coddled child of two New York artists, to her candid, tell-all style and her rise to fame on the cusp of her controversial brain-child, “Girls.” But Dunham responds to criticism well. Even when her show was accused of whitewashing the New York experience, she sympathized. Dunham countered that her characters are a reflection of her own upbringing, and to cast people of color would be to ignore their experiences and pretend she could relate. Although, that is no excuse, Dunham said.
More recently, Dunham was slain for her memoir in a scathing review that appeared in the right-wing magazine, The National Review. In his article, author Kevin D. Williamson accused Dunham of sexually abusing her younger sister. The experiences Williamson exploits are detailed in a chapter of Dunham’s book, in which a 7-year-old Lena bribes her toddler sister for kisses. Dunham responded in a self-declared “rage spiral” on Twitter by saying “…if you were a little kid and never looked at another little kid’s vagina, well, congrats to you…also, I wish my sister wasn’t laughing so hard.”
Well, if you can drown out the media’s noise on Lena Dunham long enough to read her book Not That Kind Of Girl: A young woman tells you what she’s “learned,” you might find she’s a refreshingly good writer.
Dunham divulges her life-long obsession with telling secrets—even those that aren’t her own. Her tendency to over-share graces just about every page of her book. But Dunham reveals her life experiences in a way that encourages us all to stop being ashamed of our mistakes and to finally be at peace with even our weirdest private thoughts.
In the introduction, Dunham writes, “I’m already predicting my future shame at thinking I had anything to offer you…No, I am not a sexpert, a psychologist, or a dietitian. I am not a mother of three or the owner of a successful hosiery franchise. But I am a girl with a keen interest in having it all.”
I’ll admit, I got way more out of this book having already been an obsessive consumer of “Girls.” There’s just something about Dunham’s sarcastic flair and witty reveries that’s more rewarding after you’ve seen her breasts on TV. But don’t worry, for all you Dunham novices, there’s an entire chapter devoted to her feelings about getting naked on camera to help you connect the dots.
The most memorable clips, for me, are both the pages that made me laugh out loud and those that made me look deeper into myself to unearth a breed of self-acceptance I didn’t know I was capable of. My favorite chapters likely aren’t the ones quoted in every other review, mostly because I responded best to the parts to which I relate. Such as the old-school, self-developed nude self-portraits Dunham found of her mother; “Imagine going to all that effort, just to find out what your bush looks like when paired with lime-green rain boots and shining aviators. This wasn’t as simple as swinging your iPhone around and pushing your tits together. This took work.” Or Dunham’s appreciation of her womanhood: “It’s a special kind of privilege to be born into the body you wanted, to embrace the essence of your gender even as your recognize what you are up against. Even as you seek to redefine it.”
However, what I think I took away most from this book are Dunham’s weird, real and eye-opening incidents of anxiety. “Girls” character Hannah Horvath illuminates some of Dunham’s struggles with obsessive compulsive disorder, but her memoir delves even deeper. Critics of Dunham are quick to categorize her trips to the therapist as the whiny moans of a privileged and over-pampered tween. But Dunham’s disclosure of the interworkings of her consciousness bring much-needed attention to the insecurities and fears so many of us can relate to but that we often suppress for fear of alienation.
Ms. Lena Dunham is a breath of fresh air amidst the bland faces the media thinks I need to know. Likewise, her book was an insightful and hilarious read that I will treasure as I wait for the next season of “Girls” to premiere.
