Not That Kind of Girl

Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned" is a memoir and essay collection by Lena Dunham, creator and star of the HBO series Girls. Organized into five thematic sections, the book traces Dunham's experiences from childhood through her mid-twenties, covering sex, body image, friendship, work, and existential questions. Interspersed among the longer personal essays are short list-form pieces that provide comic relief and supplementary detail.

In her introduction, Dunham describes herself at twenty, living alone in a dormitory at Oberlin College, a small liberal arts school in Ohio. She was consumed by self-hatred, masking her insecurity with provocative fashion and manic social energy while taking medication for anxiety. At a thrift store, she discovered a yellowed copy of Having It All by Helen Gurley Brown. Despite finding much of Brown's advice absurd, Dunham was moved by Brown's willingness to share her humiliations and argue that an unpolished, overlooked woman can triumph. This discovery frames the book's purpose: Dunham declares her intention to tell her own stories, asserting that "There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman" (6).

The first section opens with Dunham's account of losing her virginity. As a child, she wrote a vow of celibacy on paper and ate it. Opportunities for sex did not arise through high school or her first year at the New School in Manhattan. After transferring to Oberlin, she orchestrated a party to lure a fellow student named Jonah to her room, where they had painful, anticlimactic sex. She felt unchanged the next morning, briefly dated Jonah, ended it within twelve hours, and later wrote the scene into her first film, Creative Nonfiction, finding the act of performing it more transformative than the actual experience. A companion essay explores her habit of platonic bed sharing, inviting men she was attracted to into her bed for companionship without sex. She traces this pattern to childhood sleep anxiety so severe she routinely displaced her father to sleep beside her mother. After college, a relationship with a former television personality who repeatedly refused to sleep with her crystallized the arrangement's futility: On Valentine's Day, she put on lace underwear and begged him; he took a sleeping pill and fell asleep. She called a cab and left.

The section's most wrenching essay concerns a college acquaintance Dunham calls Barry. She opens by calling herself an unreliable narrator, admitting she had previously described this encounter as "the upsetting but educational choice of a girl who was new to sex when, in fact, it didn't feel like a choice at all" (59). At a college party, heavily intoxicated, she mistook Barry for a friend and left with him despite a warning. Barry penetrated her digitally without consent in a parking lot, then accompanied her home, where fragmented memories depicted aggressive sex and a removed condom. The next day, her friend Audrey whispered that Dunham had been raped, and Dunham burst out laughing. Her vaginal pain lasted for days, and a doctor confirmed physical trauma. Years later, she told her partner Jack by accident and broke down in tears. Jack responded with empathy, telling her nothing had changed. Dunham looked in the mirror and found her face intact: "I look all right. I look like myself" (74).

Between these essays, Dunham examines her pattern of attraction to disrespectful men. A two-year relationship with Joaquin, a cynical older man she met at a postcollege restaurant job, proves most damaging. He was emotionally unavailable, had a girlfriend, and treated Dunham with intermittent cruelty. She concludes: "When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself" (57). The section closes with Dunham surveying her four declarations of love, ending with her current partner, Jack, about whom she deliberately withholds details, saying he is hers to protect.

The second section chronicles Dunham's relationship with food, weight, and physical self-image. She gained thirty pounds after her first period, became vegan at fourteen, and acknowledges that the diet gradually morphed from a moral position into an ineffective eating disorder. After college, she began tracking calories at a nutritionist's urging, lost nearly twenty pounds, then spent a year yo-yoing. She includes a week of detailed food journal entries. A related essay connects her on-screen nudity to her mother's 1970s practice of photographing herself, often nude, in their Soho loft. Dunham explains that her body is simply "a tool to tell the story" (110) and that depicting sex honestly on her HBO show does not fall within her "zone of terror" (113). The section also addresses her diagnosis of endometriosis, a condition in which cells that normally line the uterus grow outside it, explaining her lifelong pelvic pain and raising concerns about fertility.

The third section explores Dunham's intense relationships with women, including a night in London with Nellie, a British playwright whose company produces an emotional intimacy Dunham has rarely experienced with a peer. The section's central essay chronicles her relationship with her younger sister Grace, who was self-possessed and opaque from infancy. Grace came out as gay at seventeen over pad thai. Dunham sobbed, not from disapproval but from a sudden understanding of how little she knew about Grace's inner life. She recalled that Grace had announced in preschool she was going to marry a girl named Madison Lane, a declaration the family had treated as a joke.

The fourth section surveys Dunham's adversarial relationship with education, including a fifth-grade teacher named Nathan whose inappropriate attention, such as rubbing her neck in class and making suggestive remarks, went largely unaddressed when her mother confronted the school. Dunham reflects that "no one really listens to kids" (177). After graduating from Oberlin, Dunham lived unemployed in her parents' loft until her childhood friend Isabel helped her get a job at Peach and the Babke, a children's clothing store in Tribeca. There, Dunham and her friends Isabel and Joana conceived a web series called Delusional Downtown Divas, which attracted a gallery audience and led to an invitation to host the Guggenheim's First Annual Art Awards, launching their creative careers. An essay on Hollywood describes encounters with powerful men her friend Jenni dubs Sunshine Stealers: men who sought to extract energy and ideas from younger women while offering little in return.

The fifth section addresses therapy, mortality, and identity. Dunham traces her lifelong relationship with therapy from childhood fears of leprosy and sleep through a deep bond with her therapist Robyn, whose daughter Audrey became Dunham's close friend and college companion. An essay on death traces her preoccupation with mortality to a dissociative childhood sensation, her grandmother's death when Dunham was fourteen, and the AIDS crisis of her Soho upbringing. After college, she spent an entire summer convinced she had contracted HIV before testing negative. Three summers at Fernwood Cove Camp for Girls provide a lens on belonging and disappointment. The book's final long essay finds Dunham in Los Angeles amid a severe mental health crisis, reconnecting with Ryan, a college acquaintance and radical nonconformist. Ryan tells Dunham he always respected her because she made things while everyone else just made friends, a compliment that validates what others have found problematic about her. She responds to his later invitation by offering her guest room: "Always stay here if you need a place to be. That's what I can offer" (292).

Throughout, interspersed list essays catalog awkward flirtation attempts, lessons from her parents, unsent angry emails, health anxieties, and reflections on fame. Together, the essays form a self-portrait of a young woman working through anxiety, desire, creative ambition, and the slow, uneven process of learning to inhabit her own life.