Far be it from me to tell someone not to write until their heart’s content. I maintain that putting pen to paper, or filling up a blinking cursor with type, can be as cathartic as anything else experienced. However, that doesn’t make it very good, or worth $3.7 Million. And it begs the question if Lena Dunham hadn’t struck a sort of millennial gold with her HBO show, Girls, would the world know about her musings on ice pops, celibacy, and diaries?
Or would she still be one of those rich, Instagramming celebrity kids who say they’re going to do something fantastic, but end up stoned, eating cereal, and posing with their Louis Vuitton covered gun racks?
That’s hard to say, but what we’ve caught a glimpse of regarding the thoughts that will fill up Dunham’s proposed advice book titled Not That Kind of Girl, sounds like a mix of Twitter and Facebook updates and an Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret round of self-introspection and random observations about life’s foibles and quirks, perhaps without the edit screen of many a first-time writer. Gawker reports that there are such entries about what Dunham ate during 2010, and what she thinks of her FUPA (fat upper pussy area) and what perhaps you can do to minimize it since this is maybe, possibly, an advice book after all. I’m thinking maybe Pussy Pilates? I dunno.
And because Buzzfeed is also awesome, they did the 2012 version of setting some of her most introspective musings to Instagram instead of to music like us hip, cool cats would have done in the 1990’s when spoken word was awesome.
But basically what you should probably know about Dunham is that she thinks things like this:
“I’ve been in therapy since I was seven.”
“When I was about nine I developed a terrible fear of being anorexic.”
“When I got to college I suddenly had the sense that my upbringing hadn’t been very “real.”
“Once I had a vegan dinner party which was chronicled for the style section of the New York Times.”
“Every ice pop I ate, every movie I watched, every poem I wrote was tinged with a fearful loss.”
“I’ve never kept a diary, [because] if a girl writes in her diary and no one’s there to read it did she really write at all?”
“That night I accepted some liquefied marijuana paste from someone’s Uncle Dennis.”
So, you know, take from that what you will. Yet, The Atlantic Wire thinks that there may be more beneath the surface and that Dunham isn’t a bad writer who “knows how to construct an essay.” That should give some of you guys out there clambering to become essayists and memoir-ists out there some hope, or least a basis to start from if ever you want to turn your scintillating tweets into prose.
The publishing house that’s picked up this work of psychoanalysis is Random House, whom just gave all of their employees $5,000 Christmas bonuses for the success of subway porn explosion, Fifty Shades of Grey. I’m guessing they’re hoping this will be similarly catchy for the under thirty set, like a primer on lamentable feats of optimism when faced with the quarter-life crisis or something else self-helpish like that.
Will Dunham’s offering be successful? Who knows? Is she on the verge of a new imagining of Girl Power? Could be. (What would her Spice Girl name be we wonder?) It’s all maybe too soon to tell, but we imagine someone had to wade into the narrative of obese vulva, so why not someone who’s spent a lot of time analyzing their own, right? Right.
