Not That Kind of Girl

Dunham writes a memoir Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned.” She dedicates the book to her family, her boyfriend, and to “Nora” — Nora Ephron, the writer and director, and Dunham’s mentor and friend. In the spirit of Helen Gurley Brown’s Having it All, Dunham doles out advice to young millennials, recounts tales of therapy sessions, boyfriend choices, terrible life choices, and her penchant for appropriating her family’s stories into her work.

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. 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 no more than an exercise in vanity and that we should appreciate this new world for women, sit down, and shut up.