cover image Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned”

Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned”

Lena Dunham, read by the author. Random House Audio, unabridged, 5 CDs, 6 hrs., $35 ISBN 978-0-8041-2731-8

Filmmaker (Tiny Furniture) and TV creator and actress (Girls) Dunham writes about everything from work and love to dieting in this sharp and often salacious essay collection. The essays are funny and raw, but these qualities are hard to detect in the audio edition because Dunham gives a somewhat lackluster reading of her book. Her pacing is slow and restrained, which seems at odds with the tone of the essays. The result is somewhat unengaging, and the essays begin to bleed into each other. Occasionally Dunham impersonates the people she writes about—she gives a relationship expert a thick New York accent and puts on a low, dopey voice for some of the men she describes—livening up the performance a bit. A Knopf hardcover. (Oct.)