Excerpts from Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned” by Lena Dunham - a finally crafted book of personal essays and thought provoking stories.

1. Exerpts from “Not That Kind of Girl” by Lena
Dunham
On oversharing
I've thought about this a lot because it's a challenging thing when you're
a person who has a desire, or let's say a compulsion, to share facts about
your personal life. If that's the way you process the world — is to make
creative content based on your personal life — then you have to be really
careful about making yourself too exposed. ...
The term "oversharing" is so complicated because I do think that it's
really gendered. I think when men share their experiences, it's bravery
and when women share their experiences, it's some sort of — people are
like, "TMI." Too much information has always been my least favorite
phrase because what exactly constitutes too much information? It seems
like it has a lot to do with who is giving you the information, and I feel as
though there's some sense that society trivializes female experiences.
And so when you share them, they aren't considered as vital as their male
counterparts' [experiences] and that's something that I've always
roundly rejected.
On using writing to process being sexually assaulted in college
It was a painful experience physically and emotionally and one I spent a
long time trying to reconcile. ... I actually [have] been thinking about it a
lot this week because I sent an email to somebody who I had known at
that time who knew the guy who had perpetrated the act. ... I wanted to
make it clear to this old friend what I felt had happened before he
potentially bought the book at Hudson News and read about it.
I hated the idea of somebody finding out that information
[independently of me telling them] because at the time that it happened,
it wasn't something I was able to be honest about. I was able to share
pieces, but I used the lens of humor, which has always been my default-
mode to try to talk around it.
I said to this old friend in an email, "I spent so much time scared; I spent
so much time ashamed. I don't feel that way anymore and it's not
because of my job, it's not because of my boyfriend, it's not because of

2. feminism, though all those things helped. It's because I told the story.
And I'm still here, and my identity hasn't shifted in some way that I can't
repair. And I still feel like myself and I feel less alone."
On depictions of sex in movies and pornography
I do think that kids have been miseducated about what sex is by films. I
think that films have white-washed sex in many ways and sort of tried to
hide what is messy and what is challenging about it.
And I feel like there's a couple brands like, "I'm so angry! I hate you so
much! We need to have sex right now!" which isn't particularly healthy,
or "I'm so in love with you that the minute that we get in I'm going to
shed my negligee and we're going to be doing it."
I mean, I think that most depictions of sex are destructive.
On her character Hannah's OCD relapse mirroring her own
experience
I had had an obsessive-compulsive — let's use the term "meltdown" —
right before season one came out and right as we were beginning to shoot
season two. I had a moment where those things came back in a way that
was really harsh and uncomfortable and a reminder of how bad it could
get.
And ... at that point I had a whole writing staff who I worked with and a
close relationship with Jenni [Konner] and Judd [Apatow], who produce
the show with me. That was something they had lived through with me
and we thought, "This is exciting and important to talk about." ...
In the show, Hannah has to write her book and she has writers block, a
deadline coming up, a certain kind of attention she hasn't had before,
and OCD, which can very often be instigated by stress, comes barreling
back. So that really paralleled my experience with making the show and
finding myself under a new kind of pressure and resorting to these old
habits. ...
What was hard was to perform it because you spend so much of your life,
as a person with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a person with any kind

3. of mental illness, trying to camouflage your habits, trying to appear
normal — so to say to myself, "I'm going to go in front of this crew of
Italian men ... and perform these super personal ticks and quirks," that
was really scary. That was scarier to me than any sex scene. Also, the
feeling, once I turn this on, once I open the flood gates of letting myself
check over my shoulders eight times and blink my eyes, am I going to be
able to stop?
On her own life changing much more than her character
Hannah's life and the challenges that creates
So many people ask the question, "Is it hard for you to write about
Hannah because now you work in Hollywood and go to fancy parties and
your life doesn't resemble hers?" And I think to myself, "No, that's not
hard because ... we all can transfer the awkwardness we feel at any social
event to any other social event." And you're a writer, so you use your
imagination and you create circumstances that don't necessarily exist.
But it is hard sometimes to continue to write a character who has such
limited and limiting responses to the world around her. And I really have
to remember where she's coming from and have sympathy for her ...
One of our writers ... is the keeper of the timetable of the show. He could
tell you exactly how many weeks, months, years have passed in the world
of the show from the first episode to the 42nd episode. ... The span of
time we've covered in the show is much shorter than the span of the time
in which I've been doing the show. So [Hannah has] grown less both
chronologically and emotionally than I have since we started. She's only
had one birthday since we began. So that's a funny thing to remember.
She hasn't had this transformative job and lived four and a- half years
doing this — she's been stuck in Brooklyn.
On what feminism means to her
My version of feminism is at its most basic level — it's about equality. I
think that so many women have been misinformed about what feminism
means. They think it means growing out your armpit hair, burning your
bras and storming through the streets with a skewer ready to get men.

4. What it actually means is you believe in human rights and women should
be fairly compensated for the jobs that they do and that they should be
[offered] the same opportunities and they shouldn't be discriminated
against or hurt because of their gender.
There are more women than there has ever been before and each one is
unique and there's a lot of ways to express your femaleness. And we can't
limit each other in that department; all we can do is support each other.
So what I love about feminism is that it seems like an irrefutable concept,
which is equality, caring for each other, supporting each other, looking
out for each other and being strong in the face of a lot of societal factors
that are telling us to sit down and shut up.