Very few women have become famous for being who they actually are, nuanced and imperfect. When honesty happens, it's usually couched in self-ridicule or self-help. Dunham doesn't apologize like that-she simply tells her story as if it might be interesting. The result is shocking and radical because it is utterly familiar. Not That Kind of Girl is hilarious, artful, and staggeringly intimate; I read it shivering with recognition.

I really did not feel okay about any of this, and there was really nothing I could do about any of it.

I looked out the window for other passengers in love with their drivers, but we were well disguised, we pretended boredom and prayed for traffic.

I gave you things I wasn't sure I even had.

We come from long lines of people destined never to meet.

I think it's more interesting if you go all the way with the world you have, and really look at it, and push it to an even more extreme extreme.

I supposed this was one reason why people got married, to make a fiction that was tellable. It wasn’t just movies that couldn’t contain the full cast of characters — it was us. We had to winnow life down so we knew where to put our tenderness and attention; and that was a good, sweet thing. But together or alone, we were still embedded in a kaleidoscope, ruthlessly varied and continuous, until the end of the end.