Not That Kind of Girl [electronic resource] : A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"

Titre:

Auteur:

Dunham, Lena.

Description:

Éditeur:

Penguin Random House,

Date:

2014

Format numérique:

CLOUDLIBRARY MP3

Langue:

Anglais

Résumé

For readers of Nora Ephron, Tina Fey, and David Sedaris, this hilarious, poignant, and extremely frank collection of personal essays confirms Lena Dunham--the acclaimed creator, producer, and star of HBO's Girls --as one of the brightest and most original writers working today.
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"If I can take what I've learned in this life and make one treacherous relationship or degrading job easier for you, perhaps even prevent you from becoming temporarily vegan, then every misstep of mine will have been worthwhile. This book contains stories about wonderful nights with terrible boys and terrible days with wonderful friends, about ambition and the two existential crises I had before the age of twenty. About fashion and its many discontents. About publicly sharing your body, having to prove yourself in a meeting full of fifty-year-old men, and the health fears (tinnitus, lamp dust, infertility) that keep me up at night. I'm already predicting my future shame at thinking I had anything to offer you with this book,nbsp; but also my future glory in having stopped you from trying an expensive juice cleanse or having the kind of sexual encounter where you keep your sneakers on. No, I am not a sexpert, a psychologist, or a registered dietician. I am not a married mother of three or the owner of a successful hosiery franchise. But I am a girl with a keen interest in self-actualization, sending hopeful dispatches from the front lines of that struggle."

Critiques (6)

Critique du Publishers Weekly

Reviewed by Rachel Deahl. Filmmaker (Tiny Furniture) and TV creator (Girls) Dunham has been compared to all manner of comic intellectual impresarios, from Woody Allen to Nora Ephron and Tina Fey. This makes it all the more delightful that Dunham mines her first book from an unexpected source: Helen Gurley Brown's Having It All, which she stumbled upon in a thrift store in college. Dunham hopes that her collection of personal essays will do for its intended readers-the young and female-what the one-time Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief's 1982 guide did for her. Having It All is, Dunham admits, full of mostly dated and "bananas" advice-on everything from dieting to man pleasing-but it imparted an important takeaway: meek women can inherit success, love, and self-worth, if not the Earth. Dunham is not unlike these women (or "Mouseburgers," in Brown's words), who can, she explains, "triumph, having lived to tell the tale of being overlooked and underloved." She breaks her book into sections ("Love & Sex," "Body," "Work," etc.) and offers tales of her own experiences being overlooked and underloved. If that sounds corny or overly earnest, the essays that compose the book are neither. They're dark, discomforting, and very funny. Whether discussing her forays into yo-yo dieting (" `Diet' Is a Four-Letter Word") or the time she thinks she might have been raped ("Barry"), Dunham is expert at combining despair and humor. Describing a misanthropic ex, she writes: "His critical nature proved suffocating-he hated my skirts, my friends, and my work. He hated rom-coms and just plain coms." The book is filled with amusing phrases like this one, as Dunham delivers sad-and probably, for many readers, sadly familiar-tales of hating her body and trying too hard to make undeserving men love her. Dunham is an oddly polarizing figure in today's culture-maybe because she's too young and successful; maybe because she gets conflated her with Hannah Horvath, her self-involved character on Girls; or maybe simply because her detractors are louder than her fans-but hopefully this won't keep readers away from this collection. It would be a shame, because the book is touching, at times profound, and deeply funny. It also addresses something that other female funny people of Dunham's stature do not. The myth, as Gurley Brown and others have laid it out, is that we can shed our Mouseburger selves to become something better. While Dunham is eager for that something better, she doesn't want to lose sight of the Mouseburger inside. This is one of the things she grapples with throughout these essays: how we become accepted and loved and popular, without casting aside, or trying to hide, the unloved, unpopular people we once were. In fact, Dunham seems to want to revel in the dark spaces-the terrifying and awkward moments in life-which is pretty great. Not only does this provide her wonderful material, but it's an invigorating, refreshing slap in the face to a world that is so unwelcoming to all the amusing, sweet, smart Mouseburgers out there. (Sept. 30) Rachel Deahl is PW's News Director. © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Critique de Booklist

*Starred Review* Dunham opens her memoir by reminding readers of the audacity inherent in believing one's own story is worth telling especially if one happens to be a woman and her commitment to this belief is an invisible footnote on every page of her adroit, funny first book. Dunham, who professes to live in a world that is almost compulsively free of secrets, plunges to deep-sea depths of young womanhood with this collection of keenly felt childhood memories and adult ruminations that often seem told expressly to you, the reader she sometimes addresses. She discusses stupid jobs, bad boyfriends, upsetting sex, psychological struggles, and hypotheticals with a smart candor readers would expect from the late-twentysomething producer-writer-director-star of the HBO show Girls, for which she's garnered acclaim and awards. But most arresting are her achingly self-aware and mirthful portrayals of the particular and peculiar sadnesses of growing up, the recurring realization that the many milestones one is led to believe will usher in the next step to adulthood with a distinct ping rarely make a sound at all until one writes about them. Drawings by illustrator Joana Avillez, Dunham's lifelong friend, contribute to the charming, confessional reading.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: If the author's sold-out tour to accompany the book's release on September 30 and her 1.74 million Twitter followers are any indication, this book's audience is an enthusiastic one.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2014 Booklist

Critique du New York Review of Books

FIRST THEY CAME for Lena Dunham, and I did not speak out - because I was not Lena Dunham. There exists a pressure for young women to either align or distance themselves from the creator of "Girls." Fans and critics alike have praised, scrutinized and Photoshopped her, often with skewed motivations. As a result, a critical cocoon has formed around Dunham wherein it's O.K. to acknowledge her as a feminist icon, but beyond that lies a danger zone - after all, who wants one's opinions lumped in with the slavishly sycophantic, the nakedly jealous, the casually misogynistic or the blatantly ageist? Thankfully, Dunham's "Not That Kind of Girl" offers a reprieve from the hubbub, as it was written not by devotees or detractors but by one woman. "Not That Kind of Girl" is a hybrid of essays, emails and lists reminiscent, most recently, of Mindy Kaling's "Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?" with a bit of Jenny Lawson's "Let's Pretend This Never Happened" sprinkled on top. Dunham uses Helen Gurley Brown's "Having It All" as her launching pad, having purchased the book as "a decorative joke" during college. Now it's time for her own twist. "If I could take what I've learned and make one menial job easier for you," she writes, "or prevent you from having the kind of sex where you feel you must keep your sneakers on in case you want to run away during the act, then every misstep of mine was worthwhile." Learn From My Mistakes, Ladies is a solid theme, and one gets the sense that, even with such a sizable platform, Dunham needed a theme. This is a common conundrum for essayists, the expectation of a singular purpose. So common that one could graft the opening of Meghan Daum's seminal "My Misspent Youth" (to which every confessional essayist of this century owes a debt of gratitude) onto "Not That Kind of Girl." Quoth Daum: "I'm inclined to catalog my experiences and turn them over in my head until some kind of theme emerges and I feel I can link the personal banalities to something larger and worth telling." Dunham, for the most part, succeeds in doing this. Her often hilarious book is divided into five sections: "Love & Sex," "Body," "Friendship," "Work" and "Big Picture." Because we're dealing with a person and not a food pyramid, these topics quickly bleed outside their self-prescribed boundaries. In the first and longest section, we are introduced to a neurotic, self-pitying girl who enjoys the glimpse sex gives her into her "partner's subconscious, which was maybe the only time I actually believed anyone besides me even existed." She feels abnormal, disconnected and friendless. As the book progresses, we learn that she harbors fears of appendicitis, leprosy, headaches, milk, tinnitus and lamp dust. That's the short list. "Not That Kind of Girl" is familiar fare. Dunham chronicles her attempts to lose her virginity and lose weight She tells gut-wrenching stories of sex. She gets a job, goes to camp, grapples with a medical diagnosis and experiments with early iterations of technology. When her sister is bom, she wails "INTRUDER! RETURN HER!" As Nora Ephron said, "everything is copy," and though such topics are well trodden, Dunham makes them shine. Early attempts at intercourse are likened to "shoving a loofah into a Mason jar." She captures the nature of teenage longing ("Her face is so beautiful that sometimes I can't help but imagine it superimposed over my own") and brings us into young adulthood with observations like "I boarded a Greyhound to Ithaca to see a college friend, the kind of purposeless trip you will never take again after age 25." She's also just plain funny: "When I was born I was very fat for a baby - 11 pounds (which sounds thin to me now)." She is at her strongest when she focuses on those she loves. Her sister has "the comforting, sleep-inducing properties of a hot-water bottle or a cat." Her characterizations of her parents are both vivid and kind, a rare overlap for a humor writer. They infuse the book with pocketable lessons ("Luxury is nice, but creativity is nicer" and "Drunk emotions aren't real emotions"). The best essays are platonic love stories: "Little Leather Gloves" centers on old friends and the need for creativity (thus touching on Dunham's day job, something the book does sparingly). "Therapy & Me" is a smoothly star-crossed story of friendship and psychoanalysis. essays that start thematically and drill down for proof are less successful. Instead of building, they read as meandering versions of the lists peppered between them, relying on illustrated breaks in lieu of transitions. "Girl Crush," a herky-jerky meditation on friendship, gives similar real estate to Dunham's first female crush, her grandma Dottie, her friend Deb, a "beautiful depressive" named Leanne, a field trip to Washington, "a prodigious British playwright," a girl named Sofia, back to the playwright, girls she kissed in college and back to the playwright again. Another essay, a kind of open letter to Hollywood men who "have been at it a little too long," is sharply observed but never quite congeals. "Hello Mother, Hello Father" ends with a lovely dream that fails to bring a sense of narrative to the preceding pages. She then tacks on a mini-essay on the same topic, material she apparently couldn't part with when writing the first essay. No darlings were hurt during the making of these chapters. The shorter pieces are influenced by Ephron's "I Feel Bad About My Neck." Some, such as "18 Unlikely Things I've Said Flirtatiously," are inspired ("I'm obsessed with the curtains in your van!"), but others are prone to an everything -but-the-kitchen-sink quality. A chapter called "What's in My Bag" contains exactly what you think it contains. "Emails I Would Send if I Were One Ounce Crazier/Angrier/Braver" is an uncharacteristically bland exercise in vengeance. An 11-page food diary, "the most secret and humiliating document on my computer," is more comprehensive than confessional. Dunham so frequently references her childhood facility for poetry, it's surprising to see none of it reprinted in full here. The real pileup danger, however, lies with her jokes about her own solipsism. Dunham is so adamant that she not apologize for her self-confidence ("This was the time in life before I learned it wasn't considered appropriate by society at large to like yourself") that she beats her critics to the punch, and lines such as "What does this all mean for me?" in response to a grandparent's death can be jarring. This is because the overall portrait of "Not That Kind of Girl" is actually not of a selfish girl. It's of a candid, thoughtful woman who considers being female "a sacred joy," and who, despite her neurosis, simply isn't as self -centered as the character she plays on TV. The final essay, "Guide to Running Away," is written in the second person, a nod to the book's how-to thesis. Here she's too specific and squanders the potential inclusiveness of the format: "Your godparents, also city people, live a mile down the road. She has red hair and cat's-eye glasses; he is bald and does one voice to impersonate all four Beatles," and "Everyone tells you that you look like your aunt." Yet even this essay is as touching for what it achieves as it is for what it tries to achieve - to connect with young women by connecting with herself. But in order to enjoy "Not That Kind of Girl," we must dissolve the "you're either with us or against us" critical barrier around Dunham. She did not come first, and she will not be last, but she has earned the right to be listened to, to be judged on the quality of her writing, even when what we read sounds familiar. If we continue to view her solely through the prism of her fame, to interpret her every blink as a bellwether of modern feminism, Lena Dunham will become, paradoxically, impossible to hear. SLOANE CROSLEY is the author of "I Was Told There'd Be Cake" and "How Did You Get This Number." Her first novel, "The Clasp," will be published next year.

Critique du Guardian

Lena Dunham's first book, like Dunham herself, has accrued a cultural significance that is much greater than the sum of the parts. The daughter of two New York artists, she has been the focus of US media attention since she was a child, to a degree that most people would find bewildering - though she, according to her memoir, took a dissociative pleasure in it. When she was 11, she was interviewed by US Vogue about her thoughts on fashion: "I find Calvin Klein really hard to respect because he's everywhere. I view him as a clothesmonger," the 11-year-old mused. When she was 16, the New York Times, for no obvious reason, covered a "vegan feast" she threw for her friends where shoes were banned: "I just thought it was sort of bohemian-seeming," the teenager explained. Ever since it was announced that, on the back of her debut film, Tiny Furniture, she would be directing, writing and starring in the HBO series Girls, Dunham has been dubbed by the media as the "voice of her generation" - "or at least, a voice," her character Hannah amusingly slurs to her parents while intoxicated in the pilot episode of Girls. Dunham's fans and detractors have, ever since, lionised and demonised the twentysomething to the point that she now represents whatever the hell you want: the blogging generation! Feminism! Misogyny! Just stick a reference to Dunham into your zeitgeisty feature and the youth-obsessed media will clamour to publish it. At the other end of the spectrum, blogs such as Gawker and Jezebel (Gawker's nominally feminist offshoot), staffed largely by people Dunham's age, can't kick her enough. The biggest complaint about her is that she represents all that is wrong with an over-privileged, nepotistic, Caucasian-focused slice of America. When it transpired that there were almost no people of colour in the first series of the show, critics cried racism in a way that no one ever did about the similarly New York-based and generation-defining Seinfeld, Friends or Sex and the City. Dunham has said that this isn't an excuse (she is good at taking criticism, far better than most people who are as much in the public eye as she is), and she's right. But the relevance of that comparison is twofold: first, it's a reminder that, in fact, New York is much more segregated than a lot of people appreciate. I grew up in a similar neighbourhood to Dunham and went to a similar school, and I didn't know a single black person who wasn't my babysitter until I moved to London. What's more, the expectations placed on Dunham to represent all life experiences of everyone of her generation were not only absurd but proved how good a writer she is - if she was bad, no one would have cared what she thought (although none of her critics would ever admit that). Dunham was never going to present an everyman view of the world (whatever that means). But anyone who could look beyond the general media nonsense surrounding her found a precociously smart and supple writer, which should not be a surprise. After all, the New York Times publishes vacuous trend pieces about random people every week, but HBO does not hand out TV series to any old random Calvin Klein-hating, self-consciously bohemian twentysomething. Tiny Furniture has a raw honesty to it that makes Karl Ove Knausgaard look like Whit Stillman. The first two series of Girls (which recently finished its somewhat weaker and broader third series) might have presented a privileged world, but the excellent dialogue and emotional precision outweighed all. At the end of one episode, Adam (Adam Driver), who had heretofore been portrayed purely as Hannah's unknowable lust object, turns the dynamic around and yells at her for being so self-obsessed: "You never ask me anything besides 'Does this feel OK?', or 'Do you like my skirt?', 'How much is your rent?'. You don't want to know me. You want to come over in the night and have me fuck the dog shit out of you and then leave and write about it in your diary!" Which brings us to Not That Kind of Girl, a collection of autobiographical essays, for which Dunham was paid a much-reported $3.7m (pounds 2.3m) by Random House, a figure that is simultaneously ridiculous and absolutely right. The reason she was paid this much is three-fold: first, and less relevantly to the publisher, she is a skilled writer, but there are lots of skilled writers in the world and they don't get seven-figure advances; second, she is Lena Dunham, publicity catnip with devoted fanbase; third, because it is a self-exposing memoir. Where once misery memoirs were the vogue in the publishing world, now it is books by young women writing about what is usually described as "all their flaws", which means everything that happens in their vaginas, from masturbation to menstruation, from sex to cystitis. Clit lit, I guess. Caitlin Moran does this better than anyone else, and she makes it look easy, which it is not. Some will mock Dunham's book for its casual references to her privileged, beyond-parody hipster life: her father's therapist, her mother's nutritionist, the Puerto Rican man she dated "with a tattoo that said MOM in Comic Sans". But it seems a bit rich to demand that young women reveal all about their lives and then criticise them for living the wrong kind of life. Less justifiable, though, is the self-obsession. Dunham writes that when she was younger the only thing she liked about sex was "it was maybe the only time I believed anyone besides me even existed". Judging from the excellent characters she created in Girls, Dunham has long since grown out of that and has empathy in spades, but it is not clear at all from her book. She says that Not That Kind of Girl was originally inspired by Helen Gurley Brown's Having It All, but a more instructive co mparison would be with David Sedaris. Sedaris writes about himself, his family and his neuroses brilliantly, because he always looks outward in his books, describing the world through his own unique perspective. Dunham, by contrast, is an inward writer, and even though she is a pleasure to spend time with, reading this book feels a little like being squashed up inside her bellybutton. After all these pages, I still have no real idea what her family are like. At one point, I started counting the number of times Dunham wrote about vaginas in the book (hers, mainly). I quit when I got to 25. There's sexual honesty, and then there's just sticking your head up your vagina. Some commentators have argued that clit lit it is helpful to teenage girls because it teaches them that bad sex is par for the course. But the other side of the coin is that this genre suggests the only truly interesting thing about a woman is her most intimate personal life. Certainly, Dunham sees her self-exposure as a benevolent feminist act: "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," she writes. But saying a story deserves to be told doesn't mean that it inherently does. Later, she writes that a teenage boy once told her that the fact she takes her clothes off so much on the show "made me feel better about myself". But she does not explain why, as the director, she cast conventionally beautiful actors to play all the other characters. Dunham has now made what are essentially three versions of her autobiography by the age of 28: a film, three seasons of a TV show and a book, and the gruel is running thin. The anecdotes in the book often feel like rejected ideas for Girls episodes, which, in fact, at least one of them was. Dunham describes her need to share as a compulsion: "I have to tell my stories in order to stay sane," she writes. But she also needs an editor (or an Adam) who can say to her, "Great, but perhaps we don't actually need to publish a 10-page chapter consisting purely of your food diary?" She is a brilliant talent who will write better books than this - and, really, who can blame her for taking the money and running? It's a shame, though, that her US publishers didn't take more time with her instead of rushing to cash in on the Lena Dunham industry. But then Dunham is probably used to that by now. 288pp, 4th Estate, pounds 11.89 To order Not That Kind of Girl for pounds 12.49 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or 0330 333 6846. - Hadley Freeman Caption: Captions: A one-woman industry . . . Lena Dunham At the other end of the spectrum, blogs such as Gawker and Jezebel (Gawker's nominally feminist offshoot), staffed largely by people [Lena Dunham]'s age, can't kick her enough. The biggest complaint about her is that she represents all that is wrong with an over-privileged, nepotistic, Caucasian-focused slice of America. When it transpired that there were almost no people of colour in the first series of the show, critics cried racism in a way that no one ever did about the similarly New York-based and generation-defining Seinfeld, Friends or Sex and the City. Dunham has said that this isn't an excuse (she is good at taking criticism, far better than most people who are as much in the public eye as she is), and she's right. But the relevance of that comparison is twofold: first, it's a reminder that, in fact, New York is much more segregated than a lot of people appreciate. I grew up in a similar neighbourhood to Dunham and went to a similar school, and I didn't know a single black person who wasn't my babysitter until I moved to London. What's more, the expectations placed on Dunham to represent all life experiences of everyone of her generation were not only absurd but proved how good a writer she is - if she was bad, no one would have cared what she thought (although none of her critics would ever admit that). Dunham was never going to present an everyman view of the world (whatever that means). Anyone who could look beyond the general media nonsense surrounding her found a precociously smart and supple writer, which should not be a surprise. After all, the New York Times publishes vacuous trend pieces about random people every week, but HBO does not hand out TV series to any old random Calvin Klein-hating, self-consciously bohemian twentysomething. Tiny Furniture has a raw honesty to it that makes Karl Ove Knausgaard look like Whit Stillman. The first two series of Girls (which recently finished its somewhat weaker and broader third series) might have presented a privileged world, but the excellent dialogue and emotional precision outweighed all. At the end of one episode, Adam (Adam Driver), who had heretofore been portrayed purely as [Hannah]'s unknowable lust object, turns the dynamic around and yells at her for being so self-obsessed: "You never ask me anything besides 'Does this feel OK?', or 'Do you like my skirt?', 'How much is your rent?'. You don't want to know me. You want to come over in the night and have me fuck the dog shit out of you and then leave and write about it in your diary!" - Hadley Freeman.

Critique de Kirkus

EDITOR'S NOTE: Due to an agreement with the publisher, this review will not be available online until Friday, September 26. Please check back then. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Critique du Library Journal

If you've ever seen yourself in the anxious character Hannah Horvath, then you'll love Girls creator/actress/essayist Dunham's book. Packaged as a blockbuster "how-to" for the girl who wants it all, the book discusses death, sex, and tonsil stones with casual prose and Dunham's usual endearing candor. For her, no topic is forbidden. She artfully implements deadpan humor to balance human frailty with strength in all her stories (even the most mundane, sometimes gross, and often OCD-ridden tales). She looks back on her youthful self through the lens of email exchanges with ex-lovers, extensive food logs, and drab therapy sessions with an astonishing amount of sympathy, especially for someone so critical. Cumulatively, her essays are a lesson in compassion for oneself and understanding others. She makes her hard-won lessons accessible to all readers, whether they're Girls fans or not. If her book helps to make one menial task easier for a reader, Dunham says, "Every misstep of mine was worthwhile." The author may be young, but she's certainly learned a lot. Verdict Expect high demand for this title, especially among Millennials and other fans of Dunham's TV work. As the author says frequently in this book, "Why the hell not?" [See Prepub Alert, 4/21/14.]-Kurt Yalcin, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Extraits

Little Leather Gloves The Joy of Wasting Time I remember when my schedule was as flexible as she is. ---Drake I worked at the baby store for nine months. Just recently graduated, I had stormed out of my restaurant job on a whim, causing my father to yell, "You can't just do that! What if you had children?" "Well, thank God I don't!" I yelled right back. At this point, I was living in a glorified closet at the back of my parents' loft, a room they had assigned me because they thought I would graduate and move out like a properly evolving person. The room had no windows, and so, in order to get a glimpse of daylight, I had to slide open the door to my sister's bright, airy room. "Go away," she would hiss. I was unemployed. And while I had a roof over my head (my parents') and food to eat (also technically theirs), my days were shapeless, and the disappointment of the people who loved me (my parents) was palpable. I slept until noon, became defensive when asked about my plans for the future, and gained weight like it was a viable profession. I was becoming the kind of adult parents worry about producing. I had been ambitious once. In college, all I seemed to do was found literary magazines with inexplicable names and stage experimental black--box theater and join teams (rugby, if only for a day or so). I was eager and hungry: for new art, for new friendship, for sex. Despite my ambivalence about academia, college was a wonderful gig, thousands of hours to tend to yourself like a garden. But now I was back to zero. No grades. No semesters. No CliffsNotes in case of emergency. I was lost. It's not that I didn't have plans. Oh, I had plans. Just none that these small minds could understand. My first idea was to be the assistant to a private eye. I was always being accused of extreme nosiness, so why not turn this character flaw into cold hard cash? After hunting around on Craigslist, however, it soon became clear that most private eyes worked alone---or if they needed an assistant, they wanted someone with the kind of sensual looks to bait cheating husbands. The second idea was baker. After all, I love bread and all bread by--products. But no, that involved waking up at four every morning. And knowing how to bake. What about preschool art teacher? Turns out that involved more than just a passion for pasta necklaces. There would be no rom--com--ready job for me. The only silver lining in my situation was that it allowed me to reconnect with my oldest friends, Isabel and Joana. We were all back in Tribeca, the same neighborhood where we had met in preschool. Isabel was finishing her sculpture degree, living with an aging pug named Hamlet who had once had his head run over by a truck and survived. Joana had just completed art school and was sporting the festive remains of a bleached mullet. I had broken up with the hippie boyfriend I considered my bridge to health and wholeness and was editing a "feature film" on my laptop. Isabel was living in her father's old studio, which she had decorated with found objects, standing racks of children's Halloween costumes, and a TV from 1997. When the three of us met there to catch up, Joana's nails painted like weed leaves and Monets, I felt at peace. Isabel was employed at Peach and the Babke, a high--end children's clothing store in our neighborhood. Isabel is a true eccentric---not the self--conscious kind who collects feathers and snow globes but the kind whose passions and predilections are so genuinely out of sync with the world at large that she herself becomes an object of fascination. One day Isabel had strolled into the store on a dare to inquire about employment, essentially because it was the funniest thing she could imagine doing for a living. Wearing kneesocks and a man's shirt as a dress, she had been somewhat dismayed when she was offered a job on the spot. Joana joined her there a few weeks later, when the madness of the yearly sample sale required extra hands. "It's a ball," said Isabel. "I mean, it's awfully easy," said Joana. Peach and the Babke sold baby clothes at such a high price point that customers would often laugh out loud upon glimpsing a tag. Cashmere cardigans, ratty tutus, and fine--wale cords, sized six months to eight years. This is where you came if you wanted your daughter to look like a Dorothea Lange photo or your son to resemble a jaunty old--time train conductor, all oversize overalls and perky wool caps. It will be a miracle if any of the boys who wore Peach and the Babke emerged from childhood able to maintain an erection. We often spent Isabel's lunch break in Pecan, a local coffee bar where we disturbed yuppies on laptops with our incessant---and filthy---chatter. "I can't find a goddamn fucking job and I'm too fat to be a stripper," I said as I polished off a stale croissant. Isabel paused as if contemplating an advanced theorem, then lit up. "We need another girl at Peach! We do, we do, we do!" It would be a gas, she told me. It'd be like our own secret clubhouse. "You can get tons of free ribbons!" It was such an easy job. All you had to do was fold, wrap, and minister to the rich and famous. "That's all we did as kids, be nice to art collectors so our parents could pay our tuition," Isabel said. "You'll be amazing at it." The next day, I stopped by with a copy of my résumé and met Phoebe, the manager of the store, who looked like the saddest fourth--grader you ever met but was, in reality, thirty--two and none too pleased about it. She was beautiful like a Gibson girl, a pale round face, heavy lids, and rosy lips. She wiped her hands on her plaid pinafore. "Why did you leave your last job?" she asked. "I was hooking up with someone in the kitchen and the dessert chef was a bitch," I explained. "I can pay you one hundred dollars a day, cash," she said. "Sounds good." I was secretly thrilled, both at the salary and the prospect of spending every day with my oldest and most amusing friends. "We also buy you lunch every day," Phoebe said. "The lunch is awesome!" Isabel chimed in, spreading some pint--sized leather gloves that retailed for $155 out in the display case next to a broken vintage camera (price upon request). "I'm in," I said. For reasons I will never understand but did not question, Phoebe handed me twenty--five dollars for the interview itself. And with that, Peach and the Babke became the most poorly staffed store in the history of the world. The days at Peach and the Babke followed a certain rhythm. With only one window up front, it was hard to get a sense of time passing, and so life became a sedentary, if pleasant, mass of risotto and tiny overalls. But I will reconstruct it for you as best as I can: 10:10 Roll in the door with a coffee in your hand. If you're feeling nice, you also bring one for Phoebe. "Sorry I'm late," you say before flinging your coat on the floor. 10:40 Head into the back room to start casually folding some pima--cotton baby leggings ($55 to $65) and roll--neck fisherman sweaters ($175). 10:50 Get distracted telling Joana a story about a homeless guy you saw wearing a salad spinner as a hat. 11:10 First customer rings the bell. They are either freezing and looking to browse before their next appointment or obscenely rich and about to purchase five thousand dollars' worth of gifts for their nieces. You and Joana try to do the best wrapping job you can and to calculate the tax properly, but there is a good chance you charged them an extra five hundred dollars. 11:15 Start talking about lunch. How badly you want or don't want it. How good it will be when it finally hits your lips or, alternately, how little mind you even pay to food these days. 11:25 Call next door for the specials. 12:00 Isabel arrives. She is on a schedule called Princess Hours. When you ask if you can also work Princess Hours, Phoebe says, "No, they're for princesses." 12:30 Sit down for an elaborate three--course meal. Let Phoebe try your couscous, since it's the least you can do. Split a baguette with Isabel if you can have half her butternut squash soup. Eat a pot of fresh ricotta to finish it off. 1:00 Joana leaves for therapy. 1:30 The UPS guy comes and unloads boxes of rag dolls made of vintage curtains ($320). You ask him how his son is doing. He says he's in jail. 2:00 Isabel leaves for therapy. 2:30 Meg Ryan comes in wearing a large hat, buys nothing. 3:00 Phoebe asks you to rub her head for a while. She lies on the rug in the back and moans with pleasure. A customer rings the doorbell. She says to ignore it, and when her massage is done she sends you around the corner for cappuccino and brownies. 4:00 You leave for therapy, collecting your hundred dollars. 6:00 This is the time work was actually supposed to end, but you are already home, half asleep, waiting for Jeff Ruiz to finish his landscaping job and meet you on the roof of his building to drink beer and feel each other up. Only once in nine months does Phoebe admonish you for your poor work ethic, and she feels so guilty about it that at lunch she goes across the street and buys you a scented candle. Phoebe ran the store with her mother, Linda, though Linda spent most of her time in Pennsylvania or, if she was in the city, upstairs in the apartment she kept, smoking and eating popcorn from a big metal bowl. As thoughtful and conflicted as Phoebe was, her mother was so wild her hair stood on end. Phoebe handled the practicalities of the business, while Linda conceived designs so fantastical that rather than sketch them she would just wave ribbons and scraps in the air, outlining a sweater or a tutu. Phoebe and Linda's fights had a tendency to turn rabid and ranged from small--business issues to the very fiber of their characters. "All my friends were getting abortions!" she screamed. Linda often spoke of her former life in San Francisco, prechildren, a utopia of knitwear designers and early Western practitioners of yoga who supported and inspired one another. The money was good, and the sex was even better. As they fought, Isabel and I (or Joana and I, as it was rare we all worked at once) would look at each other nervously, shrug, then proceed to try on all the dresses we carried in a child's size 8, whose hemlines hit right below our crotches (aka just right). Another common distraction was to cover our heads in rabbit--fur barrettes ($16) or strap each other up with ribbons like some ersatz Helmut Newton photograph. Sometimes I would find Phoebe crying by the air conditioner, head on the desk where she kept her old PC, staring at a pile of unpaid bills. The fact was the store was in trouble. The recession was in full swing and, in times of economic hardship, high--end children's clothing is the first thing to go. We felt a deep and impenetrable sadness when we watched a hip--hop mogul's credit card get declined, a sure sign of doom for Peach and the Babke---and for the world. Every day we hoped for a big sale, and every day we watched Phoebe's brow furrow as she went over the books, and every night we took our one--hundred--dollar bill home without reservation. The job allowed us a lot of time for socializing. Together we were finding our own New York, which looked a lot like the New York of our parents. We went to art openings for the free wine and Christmas parties for the free food, then peeled off to smoke pot on Isabel's couch and watch reruns of Seinfeld. We stopped by parties where we didn't know the host, wore skirts as tube tops and tights as pants. We split bowls of Bo-lo-gnese at chic restaurants rather than get full meals at boring ones. A night of carousing never passed without me stepping outside the experience to think, Yes, this must be what it is to be young. Upon graduation I had felt a heavy sense of doom, a sense that nothing would ever be simple again. But look, look what we had found! We were making it work, with our cash and our bad wrapping jobs, with our fried overdyed hair and our fried overprocessed foods. Everything took on a hazy romance: having a pimple, eating a doughnut, being cold. Nothing was a tragedy, and everything was a joke. I had waited a long time to be a woman, a long time to venture away from my parents, and now I had sex, once with two guys in a week, and bragged about it like a divorcée who was getting back in the game. Up to my knees in mud from a night on the town, I rinsed off in the shower as Isabel watched and said, "Handle it, dirty girl!" I didn't know the word for it, but I was happy. I was happy wrapping presents, catering to listless bankers' wives, and locking the store up with a rusty key a few minutes before closing time. I was happy being slightly condescending to people with platinum cards, reveling in our status as shopgirls who knew more than we were letting on. We would stay here in our cave, looking out on Tribeca through the picture window, and on weekends we would trip up the West Side Highway in red dresses, sloshing beer, ready to fuck and fight and fall asleep on top of one another. But ambition is a funny thing: it creeps in when you least expect it and keeps you moving, even when you think you want to stay put. I missed making things, the meaning it gave this long march we call life. One night, as we readied ourselves for another event where we weren't exactly welcome, it occurred to me: This is something. Why didn't we tell this story, instead of just living it? The story of children of the art world trying (and failing) to match their parents' successes, unsure of their own passions, but sure they wanted glory. Why didn't we make a webseries (at that point, the Internet webseries was poised to replace film, television, radio, and literature) about characters even more pathetic than we were? We never made it to the party that night. Instead we ordered pizza, curled up in easy chairs, and began pitching names and locations and plotlines into the night. We ransacked Isabel's closet for possible costume pieces (a beaded flapper dress, a Dudley Do--Right hat), and Joana conceived the hairstyle that would be her character's signature (a sleek beehive built around a shampoo bottle for height). And so, using the money that Peach and the Babke provided, we began to create something that would reflect the manic energy of this moment. It was called Delusional Downtown Divas, a title we hated but couldn't top. Isabel portrayed AgNess, an aspiring businesswoman with a passion for power suits. Joana was the enigmatic Swann, a private performance artist. My character, Oona Winegrod, was an aspiring novelist who had never actually written a word. All of them were obsessed with a young painter named Jake Pheasant. We completed ten episodes, many of which featured cameos from our parents' friends, who still viewed us as children doing an adorable class project. Looking at the videos now, they leave something to be desired. Blaringly digital, with shaky camerawork, we careen across the screen in messy costumes, cracking up at our own jokes, tickled with the ingenuity of our concept. Lines like "I just know we can join the feminist art collective if we put our minds to it and we will finally be IT girls!" are a little too real to feel like parody. The first time I showed my father the footage, we were sitting at our dining room table. He took a long sip of tea, then asked, "Why did you have to do this?" And yes, it was broad, amateurish, a little vulgar. It didn't have narrative propulsion or cinematic graces. But watching it now, I can also feel the giddiness, the joy of creation we were all experiencing, the catharsis of admitting to our situation. It jumps off the screen. It's silly and obvious and high on its own supply, but it's something. It's a step forward. People who weren't my father kind of loved it, and we were invited to present the videos in a small gallery on Greene Street in Soho. In an attempt to remain staunchly rooted in the conceptual, we decided to decorate the gallery like a replica of Isabel's apartment. We hauled all our worldly possessions across Canal Street, including a treadmill, Isabel's couch, and some family heirlooms. We pulled all--nighters, decorating the space lovingly, and I insisted on wearing painter's overalls to complement my new identity as a serious artiste. The night of our "opening" remains among the most surprising of my life: by the time I arrived (I was late, as my mother insisted I shower), the space was full, and the crowd was spilling into the street, wine in cups, feet in pirate boots and fluorescent heels. People we didn't even know were there, a testament to the idea that energy attracts energy, because our parents sure as hell weren't advertising. Someone asked to take our photograph. Isabel and Joana and I clutched at one another, unable to believe our luck. We went to a bar afterward, and a DJ gave me his business card in a way that could have been sexual. We had made it. After that, life at Peach and the Babke lost some of its luster. Work induced a sleepy malaise, and I wondered if I had recontracted mono. Joana got some illustration work and cut back on her hours. Isabel found increasing reasons not to appear. The walk across Hudson Street to open the store began to feel a little tragic. Then one day, I botched the mailing list. I was meant to send out one thousand postcards heralding our summer sample sale. But, caught up in a reverie, I didn't notice I had printed five hundred address stickers for one single family and applied nearly all of them. My error was so shocking to Linda that her nostrils flared and spit flew as she screamed at me. "I'm sorry," I told her. "But I have a bus to catch." I boarded a Greyhound to Ithaca to see a college friend, the kind of purposeless trip you will never take again after age twenty--five. We spent the weekend walking in fields, taking pictures of old--fashioned neon signs with a disposable camera, and watching carp spawn in a river. We ate nothing but hummus and drank nothing but beer. We went to his neighbor's funeral and sat in the back row and got the giggles, sprinted out. We walked around his mother's garden, crushing living things with our boots. "How's your job?" he asked. "My boss is such a bitch," I told him. I projected onto his life a sweetness, a lack of complication, the kind of vibe terrible people would call "quaint." I loved his basement apartment in a ramshackle house, the fact that there was only one Chinese restaurant in town, and that he'd never have to see a more successful person than himself at a party. I was jealous. I wanted to be in it. I wanted to fuck it up. So, on the night before I left, I drank half a whiskey ginger and hurled my naked body onto his, kissing him in an unfocused but enthusiastic way. He responded with a sad smile, and we fucked in the blue light of a documentary about police brutality. We didn't speak for a year, but I thought of his house all the time. In September of 2009 the Delusional Downtown Divas were offered our first real gig: hosting the Guggenheim's First Annual Art Awards. Our parents were shocked that this lark had brought anyone even remotely serious knocking on our door, but I've always believed that it turns people on to get made fun of, and the art world was no exception. We were offered license to run wild and a five--thousand--dollar fee to split among us. We all quit our jobs at Peach and the Babke that day with the joyful abandon of lottery winners. I rented a hundred--square--foot office in a nearby building, which became our official headquarters, and set to work. The building was populated with young handsome filmmakers in porkpie hats and professionals who couldn't quite explain what they did. People built half--pipes in their offices and -encouraged interoffice sleepovers. Everyone bought their lunch from a deli called New Fancy Food. The landlord, a Chinese woman named Summer Weinberg, asked sweetly whether I was a prostitute. Our minifridge had nothing but tres leches cake in it. We spent months preparing, creating new episodes and writing awards--show--style banter about figures like performance artist Joan Jonas ("Is she the Jonas Brothers' mother?"). We shot an episode in the museum itself and were almost removed after I encouraged Isabel to hang her leg over the mezzanine and scream, "I'm gonna pull a Carl Andre up here!" The awards themselves were a blur. We awoke early and traveled uptown to have our hair styled professionally for the first time. We hit our marks and heard our voices echo up to the rotunda. We saw James Franco, something that now seems hard to avoid. During intermission Isabel and I got into a tearful fight when I told a makeup artist that Isabel "ought to own a store." "You don't believe in me," she said. "You don't think I know how to do anything real, which is the only reason you would ever tell someone to open a store." "Yes, I do. Look at all this!" I cried. "Yeah, but we're not going to, like, do this for our lives, " Joana said. In the months that followed, we dispersed: me to Los Angeles, Joana to graduate school, Isabel to upstate New York, where she met a man named Jason with a sweet smile and no connection to the art world whatsoever. We took the videos we had made together off the Internet, embarrassed by the things we had once thought so profound. "What's the worst job you've ever had?" is a popular question in interviews and at dinner parties. "Once my boss yelled at me for giving Gwyneth Paltrow the wrong size in baby leggings," I say, wincing at the memory. What I don't say is that it felt like home, that it started our journey, that we ate the best lunches I've ever had. What I don't say is that I miss it. Excerpted from Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned" by Lena Dunham All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.