Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham
Feb. 16th, 2016 08:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroLena Dunham tells you about all the terrible choices she’s made and what she thinks they have taught her.
It’s funny in that Shatner Rules was entirely in the same genre/category, and is such a hilariously different book. Both are actor/writers basically reminiscing and telling their stories, but Shatner seems so delightfully clean and almost quaint by comparison. Of course, Shatner is 84 and Dunham is 29, which accounts for an awful lot of the difference.
Really, though, this is like being at a dinner party where Dunham tells all of her best dirty stories.*
It’s fascinating, similar to the nature of a personal blog that ends up being mass-consumed, to read about someone else’s oddities—both the things that they assumed were normal but turned out not to be, and the things they play up as weird that make me go, “Hey, I do that too!” (The real takeaway being that there’s a ton of stuff we just assume and never talk about, often about sex but also absurdly mundane, that we really should just discuss and get it out there.)
I should be clear: I’ve never, to my knowledge, seen any of Dunham’s work. I’m pretty sure I first heard about this book because somebody on Tumblr thought it was a terrifying portrait of a horrible abuser and blahdy-blah pearl-clutching. When Tumblr hates someone who’s ostensibly on their “side”, that usually means it’s something interesting enough to attract attention, and yet dares to offer a definitive opinion on something (which is, by necessity, insufficiently orthodox and therefore badevilwrong). Fast-forward to last week when I noticed it on Jethrien’s to-read list, and she bought it when pulling herself another month’s worth of books. (For the record, having read the “offensive” passages in context—they’re clearly Sarah Silverman-esque jokes with no small amount of implausible exaggeration to them. Also, plenty of the details of her stories conflict with each other. “Unreliable narrator but doesn’t it make for a better story?” is her entire writing style.)
Random bit: Apparently as a child, Dunham loved half-frozen Sara Lee pound cakes. These were a classic treat when my mother was growing up, to the point where her family thought my dad was weird when he came over for dinner and allowed his dessert to fully defrost.
I’m led to believe that “stories of college sexual misadventures” is not an officially approved dinner party topic and is somehow “inappropriate”. I disagree, and if you’ve attended a dinner party with Airspaniel, you probably will too.
Overall: Dunham presents herself as a funny social, physical and emotional trainwreck and plays up terrible things in a nonchalant, extremely-oversharing manner. Her style the absurdist humor-in-mostly-true-story that I very much appreciate; she just does it raunchier than most because that’s what sells. The thing is, she’s also an extremely successful trainwreck, which means that you feel okay laughing because you know she’s playing up the story.
It’s funny in that Shatner Rules was entirely in the same genre/category, and is such a hilariously different book. Both are actor/writers basically reminiscing and telling their stories, but Shatner seems so delightfully clean and almost quaint by comparison. Of course, Shatner is 84 and Dunham is 29, which accounts for an awful lot of the difference.
Really, though, this is like being at a dinner party where Dunham tells all of her best dirty stories.*
It’s fascinating, similar to the nature of a personal blog that ends up being mass-consumed, to read about someone else’s oddities—both the things that they assumed were normal but turned out not to be, and the things they play up as weird that make me go, “Hey, I do that too!” (The real takeaway being that there’s a ton of stuff we just assume and never talk about, often about sex but also absurdly mundane, that we really should just discuss and get it out there.)
I should be clear: I’ve never, to my knowledge, seen any of Dunham’s work. I’m pretty sure I first heard about this book because somebody on Tumblr thought it was a terrifying portrait of a horrible abuser and blahdy-blah pearl-clutching. When Tumblr hates someone who’s ostensibly on their “side”, that usually means it’s something interesting enough to attract attention, and yet dares to offer a definitive opinion on something (which is, by necessity, insufficiently orthodox and therefore badevilwrong). Fast-forward to last week when I noticed it on Jethrien’s to-read list, and she bought it when pulling herself another month’s worth of books. (For the record, having read the “offensive” passages in context—they’re clearly Sarah Silverman-esque jokes with no small amount of implausible exaggeration to them. Also, plenty of the details of her stories conflict with each other. “Unreliable narrator but doesn’t it make for a better story?” is her entire writing style.)
Random bit: Apparently as a child, Dunham loved half-frozen Sara Lee pound cakes. These were a classic treat when my mother was growing up, to the point where her family thought my dad was weird when he came over for dinner and allowed his dessert to fully defrost.
I’m led to believe that “stories of college sexual misadventures” is not an officially approved dinner party topic and is somehow “inappropriate”. I disagree, and if you’ve attended a dinner party with Airspaniel, you probably will too.
Overall: Dunham presents herself as a funny social, physical and emotional trainwreck and plays up terrible things in a nonchalant, extremely-oversharing manner. Her style the absurdist humor-in-mostly-true-story that I very much appreciate; she just does it raunchier than most because that’s what sells. The thing is, she’s also an extremely successful trainwreck, which means that you feel okay laughing because you know she’s playing up the story.
