REVIEW: Not That Kind Of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She´s "Learned"

 SYNOPSIS:

 In Not that Kind of Girl, Dunham illuminates the experiences that are part of making one's way in the world: falling in love, feeling alone, being ten pounds overweight despite eating only health food, having to prove yourself in a room full of men twice your age, finding true love, and, most of all, having the guts to believe that your story is one that deserves to be told.

Credits to Goodreads.com

 REVIEW:

After going through my posts on Instagram and seeing thousand girls showing proudly the cover of Dunham´s book ( and of course, after being totally hooked up to Girls) I decided that I HAD to read this book. Not that Kind of Girl is written by Lena Dunham, the acclaimed creator, producer and star of HBO´s Girls. This book consists in a series of essays written as a diary, in first person, where Dunham goes through all the periods of her life. The work contains five different sections that introduces the reader to a brand new chapter of the writer´s life:

Section I: Love & Sex

Section II: Body

Section III: Friendship

Section IV: Work

Section V: Big Picture

With her particular sense of humor Lena Dunham moves the reader towards her own world, full of the typical crazy experiences young people go through, such as the first sexual encounter, the ones that follow, body and self esteem issues, friends, experiences at college and later on at work.

The truth is that when I started reading the book my expectations were extremely high due to the Media and all the attention the book was getting. In general, I don´t think it is a bad book, I actually think it´s different from the rest of the books I´ve ever read.  Dunham describes things that normally women care about in a sarcastic and witty way and I enjoyed the Body Section a lot. I found it hilarious. You know  when you feel really bad about yourself just because you ate too much and gained a few pounds and it looks like the world´s gonna end? I honestly think most of us, women, just want to forget about all the beauty standards we are supposed to follow and just laugh at our problems in front of a mirror. Dunham basically achieves that while laughing at her own problems.

Pros

The way Lena Dunham writes is a positive aspect for her work. It is really easy to have an autobiographic novel turned to be boring when it is not written correctly, the fact that she is capable of  hook the reader up is something worth of merit. Also, the chapter that is dedicated to her sister is utterly touching without being excessively cheesy.

Cons

Sex, sex, sex and more sex. I have nothing against sex, but the writer enters too much detail about her sexual encounters, her masturbatory arts, etc. In my opinion sometimes it was excessive, like it was written that way on purpose.

All in all, Not That Kind of Girl presents the readers a different side of Lena Dunham that we are not used to see in her TV Show. She show us how that little naive girl becomes the woman she is now, she understands that love and sex don´t need to be essentially linked and that there is always something positive in every person she knows, because our own faults are what make us who we are.

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