Structure

“Not That Kind of Girl” by Lena Dunham is a memoir of Lena’s life and is written in a series of anecdotes. It is an episodic retelling of parts of Lena’s life and is not organized in a chronological manner. She writes about college life in one paragraph and then shifts to something that happened to her in the second grade. Rather than telling the story of her life from beginning to her current age (late 20s), she uses the anecdotes to make her point and to draw parallels and comparisons between incidents that occurred at different times of her life. She does not concern herself with what order or sequence the retelling is in. The reader has to be prepared for the disorganization of the narrative relative to chronology.

Lena uses two epigraphs at the beginning of the book – one from Madame Bovary by...