Girls ingénue Lena Dunham has announced her new book, Instagramming a photo of herself with hardback jacket (nope, it’s NOT an e-book), with the caption ‘It's official. Coming 10/7/14.’
Lena says it’s going to be a memoir of her life lessons thus far. ‘This book contains stories about wonderful nights with terrible boys and terrible days with wonderful friends, about ambition and the two existential crises I had before the age of 20,’ she’s written. ‘No, I am not a sexpert, a psychologist, or a registered dietitian. I am not a married mother-of-three or the owner of a successful hosiery franchise. But I am a girl with a keen interest in self-actualization, sending hopeful dispatches from the front lines of that struggle.’
All of which very much makes us want to read it and everything but the thing is – there are eight months to wait. So we’ve decided that a good way to fill the time is by reading eight other books that we reckon might have influenced Lena along the way. Or at least that talk about what it means to be a woman in this day and age. Debrief Book Club, anyone?
Written just as the ’80s cosmetics industry surged, Naomi Wolf’s precise, academically researched (yet witty) side-glance at the ways in which women are restricted by the supposed need to look and dress a certain way, is definitely a tome we find ourselves thinking about when yet another discussion rises up about Lena’s nudity in Girls.
This anthropological study takes us back to the primitive ages and looks at the real reason women have long hair, breasts, bums and, er, noses. Taking every theory of evolution you’ve ever heard (eg that women grew breasts to make men horny) and turning it on its head, it’s very dense, but can make you question how theories of evolution have been used to make women think that they are secondary to men. And also comes up with some brilliant facts about animals, eg did you know that elephants used to be two feet tall?
You’ll know artist Tracey Emin for her neons, or, of course, her bed. But she’s also got a book. Composed of various writings she put on her tapestries and heavily edited – Tracey is dyslexic – they are touching, harrowing and hilarious accounts of her life. One of the forbears of confessional art, it’s tough to say if Lena Dunham’s visceral anecdotal delivery, and the power she sees in confession, would exist without Tracey.
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women And The Rise Of Raunch Culture – Ariel Levy – 2005*
New York Times writer Ariel pinpoints exactly where feminism stood before its recent boom into the mainstream. Ladette culture and porn culture met somewhere in the middle and it became quite normalised for women’s sexual liberation to be done in a way that ultimately benefited a patriarchy interested in raunch and smut. Though some of its language is seen to be slut-shaming, it is very of its time and basically tells you a lot about what pop culture was doing during your teens.
OK, so it was written over 50 years ago, but reading this takedown of the myth of the happy housewife is very sobering, especially when you see how little some things have changed since then – take a look at some of the Christmas adverts bandied about every year representing women as desperate-to-please housewives, shackled to the kitchen sink.
Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown was one of the first people to assert that women should be allowed to enjoy sex on their terms. Something that, sadly, really was revolutionary at the time. She’s on one of Lena Dunham’s must-read lists for good reason: looking at the life of a women’s magazine editor who was all about telling her readers they can have a career, a family and a sex life.
Bitch: In Praise Of Difficult Women – Elizabeth Wurtzel – 1998
Elizabeth Wurtzel famously wrote this on a bit of a drugs binge that kind of sent her straight to rehab, but don't let that put you off, it's a pretty amazing look at how women have been viewed throughout history as either bitches or angels, sluts of marriage material, victims or villains. Yes she’s got some slightly dodgy points of view on the OJ Simpson case – but it perfectly captures Lena’s high and low-brow agenda and dissects the male reaction to everyone from Biblical character Delilah to Courtney Love. Well worth a read.
** Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson**
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.