‘Not That Kind of Girl’: Lena Dunham’s memoir packed with witty anecdotes, honesty

I came to Lena Dunham, appropriately enough, at my therapist's office. I was paging through the Aug. 13, 2012, issue of the New Yorker, waiting to begin my weekly session of labored oversharing, when I stumbled upon 'First Love,” her essay about being blocked on Facebook by her ex-boyfriend's mother. I missed Dunham's 2010 film 'Tiny Furniture” and had yet to catch an episode of HBO's 'Girls,” but in 'First Love,” her candor and wit came through in this brave, beguiling way that was both self-effacing and self-absorbed and, above all, hilarious. I was hooked.

It seems quaint, rereading the essay two years later, to see lines like, 'My mom is a Long Island Jew, and my dad is a Connecticut Wasp.” Did we really not know who her parents - the photographer Laurie Simmons and the painter Carroll Dunham - were back then? Were her childhood and young adulthood still shrouded in a bit of mystery? As recently as two summers ago?

The 28-year-old Dunham is, by now, arguably Hollywood's least secretive being. She regularly appears nude - physically and emotionally - on camera in 'Girls,” the critically acclaimed show she writes, directs and acts in. Her essays, unguarded and unsparing, continue to appear in the New Yorker. She was the remarkably open subject of a February 2014 Vogue cover story and was recently turned into a neoclassical bust for the New York Times Magazine's culture issue.

Still, I'm in good and plentiful company when I say ... more, please!

And more she gives us in 'Not that Kind of Girl” (Random House, 269 pages, $28), a new book of original essays for which Random House paid her a reported $3 million. More anecdotes, more honesty, more reflections. More nerve, God love her.

'There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told,” writes Dunham. 'Especially if that person is a woman. As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren't needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter. That personal writing by women is not more than an exercise in vanity and that we should appreciate this new world for women, sit down, and shut up.”

The book's richest moments occur when she pulls the curtain back on her feminist upbringing.

She reminds us exactly why she's become the face of the modern feminist movement - the body-positive, sex-positive, tell-all brand.

My favorite chapter is 'I Didn't F - Them, but They Yelled at Me,” which is the memoir Dunham plans to write when she turns 80 and can safely name the men in Hollywood who, as she writes, believe and behave as though 'life is a zero-sum game and girls are there to be your props ...”

And even when you're deeply uncomfortable and practically feeling her pain, you're grateful she's telling her stories without shame or defensiveness, which would make for a far less satisfying book (and life, for that matter).

'Not that Kind of Girl” has its weaknesses, in particular the chapters titled, '10 Reasons I <3 NY,” which offers little in the way of fresh sentiment, and '‘Diet' is a Four-Letter Word.” 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.