Lena Dunham’s neurotic, chronically melting-down character on her hit series Girls isn’t necessarily the kind of person you’d turn to for advice. But from its cover font to the cartoony spot illustrations by Joana Avillez peppering the text, her new book, Not That Kind of Girl, has the feel and aesthetic of a certain era of advice books for women. Helen Gurley Brown’s bizarre 1982 guide Having It All is specifically called out in Dunham’s introduction. And as the subtitle indicates, albeit in scare quotes, Dunham seems interested in providing actual guidance on how to become a woman.
Dunham’s style is relatively plain and not especially nuanced. If there are any David Sedaris–style joke grenades that go off in a reader’s brain a minute after reading them in Not That Kind of Girl, I didn’t find them. And occasionally, Girl lapses into unfortunate cliché, as when Dunham is overcome with sentimentality…