Lena Dunham has the last word in the having-itall wars.
Through a series of negations, Lena Dunham breaks down and redefines the seemingly never-ending quest to have it all
Self-help books are, like most genres found at your local bookstores, strategically divided down gender lines. Women are asked to “have it all”: all that can be contained within a knowable sphere in existence. Have jobs (working for appropriate companies), have husbands (after an appropriate amount of sexual partners), have children (after an appropriate amount of married years). Have everything that’s already come before you, the books say.
By contrast, self-help books aimed at men ask for the world. The male authors of the genre want to reinvent the workweek, the job itself, the amount of wealth a single person can amass; go where no man has gone before, the books insist.
This is such a small but crucial difference: Women are asked to aim for an internal success, men external — a truly perplexing form of gender essentialism that plays out on bookshelves all over the world.
Not That Kind Of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned,” the first book from Lena Dunham, creator, showrunner and star of HBO’s
Girls, is part of a hybrid genre of literature: half self-help, half memoir, the author’s attempt at sharing something vital while also acknowledging that hers is personal, anecdotal knowledge, not backed up by the figures that accompany, say, fact-checked magazine cover stories about women failing to have it all.
In the introduction, Dunham writes about discovering Helen Gurley Brown’s second book, Having It All. All took the premise of Brown’s first book, Sex and the Single Girl, to its logical conclusion: “how to get a man” to “how to get everything.” Brown’s advice, both as an author and editor of Cosmopolitan, is only partially helpful and often harmful: Dunham cites passages where Brown tells women to eat less than 1,000 calories a day. It’s a toxic beginning for a phrase that’s become even more toxic in the years since Brown popularized it; today, the question of “having it all” is more of a threat — achieve this, or else.
Not That Kind Of Girl is, in Dunham’s words, written by “a girl with a keen interest in having it all,” chronicling “hopeful dispatches from the
We keep meeting women, presented through the lens of Dunham’s own gaze
frontlines of that struggle.” The book is, like the title implies, a series of negations. Lena Dunham is not the kind of girl who can keep secrets; she’s not the kind of girl who keeps her opinions quiet; she’s not the kind of girl who hides or downplays her ambition.
The introductory, “hopeful dispatch” comes only a few pages past the dedication: “For Nora,” or the late Nora Ephron, who was a professional and personal mentor to Dunham. Before Dunham has even told us very much about herself, we’ve met two of the women who have had the most formative influence on her life. And with each chapter, we keep meeting women — her mother, sister, grandmother, friends, co-workers, enemies make various appearances and offer their own versions of advice — all of whom are presented through the lens of Dunham’s own gaze, telling us what she’s learned.
“Hopeful dispatches from the frontlines of the struggle,” then, is a nice way of describing the genre that made Helen Gurley Brown the publishing icon she is, or the kind of writing that made Nora Ephron into a role model for a certain kind of female writer. Ephron’s essay collection, Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women, is, according to its book jacket, some of her best work on “oman. And Woman.” A capital letter, a set of quotation marks; the books are funny, and relatable, and narrow. We’re reading about one woman, one experience, one story. No one here takes anything too seriously.
Including, of course, Dunham herself. Not That Kind Of Girl is a collection of all the things that have made Lena Dunham into “Lena Dunham,” a human being we’re seeing being turned into a link in a chain: Here’s how the women before her defined having it all. Here’s how Dunham will. More so than the quest to have it all, this is the passage that jumped out at me: “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.”
But the book doesn’t ask what we’ll do once we’ve finished reading, and that is, paradoxically, the best way to end an endless loop of what “all” means. Not That Kind Of Girl is about Lena Dunham, and only Lena Dunham. The answer is to go even smaller, to stop listening to the people who have the definition of “all” and want to sell it back to us. I prefer the individual approach: Here’s one woman telling us, for better or worse, the stories she wants to tell. That’s the kind of girl Lena Dunham is.