Not That Kind of Girl
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| Author | Lena Dunham |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Memoir, autobiography |
| Published | September 30, 2014 |
| Publisher | Random House |
| Pages | 265 |
| ISBN | |
Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned" is a 2014 memoir written by Lena Dunham. The book, a collection of autobiographical essays, lists, and emails, was released in hardcover by Random House on September 30, 2014 and in paperback on October 20, 2015.
Random House purchased the rights to the essay collection in October 2012 after a bidding war generated by Dunham's 66-page book proposal. Bidding was reported to have risen past $3.5 million.Not That Kind of Girl was published September 30, 2014. The book is dedicated to Nora Ephron.
Not That Kind of Girl received mixed reviews but was a commercial success, reaching #2 on The New York Times Best Seller list on October 19, 2014.
Sloane Crosley for The New York Times said the book was often hilarious but not ground-breaking in content. Crosley cautioned that attempts to view Dunham as a bellwether of modern feminism would unfairly overshadow the author.Hadley Freeman, in a review for The Guardian, described Dunham as being a smart and talented writer, and the book as being brutally honest, but also narcissistic and thin in experience. In The New Republic, James Wolcott found the book filled with "chatty punch lines, airy anecdotage, and sour kiss-offs" and, ultimately, "callow, grating, and glibly nattering."
Heidi Stevens of PopMatters wrote, "But the book, as a whole, is a lovely, touching, surprisingly sentimental portrait of a woman who, despite repeatedly baring her body and soul to audiences, remains a bit of an enigma: a young woman who sets the agenda, defies classification and seems utterly at home in her own skin." Leah Greenblatt of Entertainment Weekly gave the book a "B+" and that it was "guided mostly by a Woody-Allen-with-a-uterus kind of whimsy."
In November 2014, Dunham and the book became a subject of controversy following a profile of Dunham by Kevin D. Williamson published in National Review. In her book, Dunham describes examining her sister Grace's genitals when they were children out of curiosity, bribing her with candy for kisses and casually masturbating while lying in bed next to her. Williamson characterizes this as sexual abuse, but Lena, Grace, and child psychologists, sexual abuse experts, and researchers in human sexuality reject the notion.
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