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Girls creator Lena Dunham's new memoir is not what you might expect. The book, the myth of the overshare, the need to strip away shame in order to find truth: Johanna Schneller meets a voice of a generation

Chris Buck/The Guardian

Lena Dunham enters a suite at the Ritz-Carlton in Toronto, and thanks everyone she sees (a clutch of publicists, you) – for her lovely room, for her iced tea. When she says, “So nice to meet you,” her voice squeaks, but out of hypersincerity, not insincerity. Bubbly, unshowered, wearing a blue sweatshirt and skinny jeans, she apologizes that she’s sporting last night’s eyeliner (she arrived from L.A. late, and only slept five hours). She’s more delicate than she appears on TV. Her eyes are a clear, corn-syrup brown; her skin is creamy.

But Dunham’s most marked trait is how present she is. As she tucks her platinum-blond hair behind her ears and curls up on the couch, she is nowhere but here, looking right at you. Later tonight she’ll bound onto the Sony Centre stage for her first public reading of her new memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, and gleefully greet the capacity crowd with, “I’ve had three bags of ketchup chips and a Timbit!”

But for this hour, she’s all yours. Let’s get this out of the way: Dunham, 28, is not the character she plays on Girls, the Emmy-winning HBO series that she created, writes, directs and stars in. It’s irksome to have to write that sentence – would anyone expect David Chase to be Tony Soprano? But because Dunham is young, female and engaged in a bold experiment with transparency – she cops to all her crap, and zeroes in on her awkwardness in a way other artists do not – people make presumptions about her.

“‘Experiment with transparency’ – I love you putting it that way,” Dunham says. “It’s better than, ‘You’re an oversharer,’ which is the usual charge.”

Women are taught if we don’t have all our evidence lined up, we’re going to be dismissed. So I try to be vocal about serious, unfair advantages that men have in this world – the way they’re able to take advantage of women, and then go, ‘I didn’t do anything.’

Early in Not That Kind of Girl (out Sept. 30), Dunham lays out her intentions: “When I’m playing a character, I am never allowed to explicitly state the takeaway message of the scenes,” she writes. “So let me do it here.” And she does. She writes about her childhood in downtown Manhattan as the daughter of two visual artists, with a gay younger sister, “unsure of our own passions, but sure we wanted glory.” She goes to elementary school “overmedicated and exhausted, wearing pyjamas and a vintage hat with a veil.” She’s plagued by anxiety: germophobia, hypochondria, fear of sleep and an angst that she defines as “a syrupy terror that lasts for days.” She goes into therapy at the age of nine and stays for six years.

Dunham was born with the sense that secrets aren’t okay. “I don’t know where it comes from,” she says, “but I was constantly interrupting my family to go, ‘I’m thinking this! I’m thinking that!’” She remembers telling her mother, after she first learned about sex, “I just saw an electrical socket and I thought about sex, because you have to plug something into it!”

She writes about losing her virginity; about being attracted to men who mistreat her, and the damage that does (being treated poorly “is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment. It’s something you … learn to believe you deserve”); about careering around Manhattan’s fringes, “hungry to be seen.”

As she figures herself out, her entreaty to other young women – to pay attention to what they’re really feeling, as opposed to what they’re expected to feel – takes on genuine power.

Lena Dunham arrives for the premiere of the third season of Girls in New York, January 6, 2014: 'I think because my show is called Girls, it made people think it was going to be about all the girls, not just girls like me.' (Lucas Jackson/Reuters)

When Dunham began writing the book in 2012, it wasn’t the most logical time for “a fairly emotional memoir,” she says. It had only been two years since her feature Tiny Furniture, which she wrote, directed and starred in, had seized the attention of the entertainment industry. The first season of Girls was about to air, and some in the publishing industry wanted a more plainly hilarious book. But Dunham felt her success was galloping ahead of her, and she couldn’t fight off her need to slow down and reflect on her life. “Writing for me is catharsis,” she says. “I needed to get back to how I lived as a teenager, in a place between reality and fantasy in my bedroom.”

Her strongest essays deal with murky events – the elementary school teacher who encouraged her to write, but also behaved inappropriately; the college one-night stand that, recalled clearly, was really a sexual assault. “When men tell their stories, there’s an automatic assumption that they’re telling the truth, and when women do, there’s an automatic assumption that they’re exaggerating, hysterical or too mundane,” Dunham says.

“A huge part of this book was sharing experiences that I didn’t feel allowed to pipe up about, because I felt I’d be implicating myself somehow. Women are taught if we don’t have all our evidence lined up, we’re going to be dismissed. So I try to be vocal about serious, unfair advantages that men have in this world – the way they’re able to take advantage of women, and then go, ‘I didn’t do anything.’”

Many of the uncomfortable situations Dunham put herself in were attempts to make sense of that sexual assault. She realized she’d rather say, “I’m a person who sometimes gets drunk and wakes up on the floor and my whole body hurts,” than admit that “something sexually traumatic happened to me, and I’m still me. I’d bought into the narrative that a sexual assault would forever change you. So for a time I made it my choice: ‘See, this is how I have sex.’ But it was not who I was.”

My art is small and specific and about me. I find art that’s trying to make a big political statement without any specificity totally noxious and horrible.

Dunham made sure that her book tour, which will include onstage conversations with writers such as Zadie Smith and Caitlin Moran (her October appearance at the Toronto Reference Library sold out in a record three minutes), has a social-activism component. At many events, representatives from Planned Parenthood, which shares Dunham’s focus on women’s rights and health, will be on site; at others, she will conduct workshops encouraging young women to write.

Part of that is in response to blowback she received about Girls’ narrow focus on white, privileged women. “I think because my show is called Girls, it made people think it was going to be about all the girls, not just girls like me,” Dunham says. “The criticism made me realize that if you want to walk the talk of feminism, you have to fight for equality for everyone.”

She draws a line, however, between her politics and her art. “My politics are big and inclusive. My art is small and specific and about me,” she says. “I find art that’s trying to make a big political statement without any specificity totally noxious and horrible. When I write, I have to be in my own little space. I can’t be worrying about other people’s needs, because I’m not going to get anything done.”

Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff at the Primetime Emmy Awards in Los Angeles, Aug. 25, 2014: 'Trying to have my own independent work life, while also loving someone – it’s a complicated thing, which I’ll save for another book.' (Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

One of Dunham’s book’s more incendiary chapters, “I Didn’t Fuck Them, but They Yelled at Me,” exposes – without naming names – some powerful men who tried to control her work. “Men ask things of young women, and when the women don’t give it to them, they rage out and try to make them feel their opportunities will be limited,” she says. “I just said no to it. Some people want to eat you alive. They think the greatest honour for you would be to become a part of what they’re doing. But no, the greatest honour for me is to do what I’m doing.

“I strongly believe that a lot of the female directors who are called difficult in Hollywood are women who didn’t want to play that game,” she continues. “They weren’t going to go to dinner and be sweet and say, ‘You have more experience than me, you’re right, we should cast this 11-year-old with breast implants.’”

As well, Dunham resents it when legitimate anger in women is dismissed as “hormonal hysteria,” she says. “It keeps women from asserting themselves. If a male director screamed at people on set, people would say, ‘That crew needs to shape up.’ But if a woman did it they’d say, ‘Does she have her period? Did her baby keep her awake last night?’”

Shame is the emotion that makes us feel most isolated from each other, and the most isolated from ourselves. It’s deeply important to try to rid ourselves of it

Dunham has internalized some of that anger – she has a recurring nightmare in which she walks around the Girls set screaming, “Are you kidding me?” at everyone. “All those little affronts are cumulative,” she says. “Probably every day I feel some sting. But it wouldn’t be a fun life if I spent it going around saying, ‘What you just said is very ignorant,’ or, ‘What you just did is very minimizing.’ I had to find a way to be okay.”

She simply wants to savour her accomplishments, and keep working. “I feel happiest when I write and make things,” she says. “I feel like I’m a tool being put to its proper use. And that’s a feeling we’re all after.”

Dunham is now in a happy relationship, with the musician Jack Antonoff. But she was careful to write about him “in a way that’s not, ‘Look, I’m saved by the love of a good man,’” she says. “Because trying to have my own independent work life, while also loving someone – it’s a complicated thing, which I’ll save for another book. What’s real is, I was only able to meet Jack because I was in a place in my life where I thought I deserved to. And that was work I did with myself.”

That work – to strip away shame in order to find truth – is the stuff she wants to share. “Shame is the emotion that makes us feel most isolated from each other, and the most isolated from ourselves,” Dunham says. “It’s deeply important to try to rid ourselves of it. Exorcising your demons is a gift that you can give to other people, I think. It’s what makes our art not totally self-indulgent nonsense.”

Lena Dunham doesn’t overshare. She’s out to prove there’s no such thing.