Say hello to quirky, darkly funny memoirs in this week’s Book-A-Like!
Not that Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham:
Lena Dunham is many, many things. Creator, actor, producer and writer of the award-winning cult television show Girls, but the first thing you have to know about Lena is that she’s unafraid to say exactly what she thinks. She’s also provocative, very funny, original, dead-pan, disturbing, neurotic, simultaneously deep and shallow, and often way, way out there.
This book is a collection of her experiences, stories that have, as she describes them, “little baby morals”: about dieting, about dressing, about friendship and existential crises. These are stories that most twenty something year old girls will be able to relate to: about the guys she’s let sleep in her bed who didn’t really want to be with her, about getting her butt touched at an internship and having to prove herself in a meeting full of 50-year-old men. It’s all about trying to work out what to wear, what to say and how to be, every single day.
The Anti-Cool Girl by Rosie Waterland:
Rosie Waterland has never been cool. Growing up in housing commission, Rosie was cursed with a near perfect, beautiful older sister who dressed like Mariah Carey on a Best & Less budget while Rosie was still struggling with various toilet mishaps. She soon realised that she was the Doug Pitt to her sister’s Brad, and that cool was not going to be her currency in this life.
But that was only one of the problems Rosie faced. With two addicts for parents, she grew up amidst rehab stays, AA meetings, overdoses, narrow escapes from drug dealers and a merry-go-round of dodgy boyfriends in her mother’s life. Rosie watched as her dad passed out/was arrested/vomited, and had to talk her mum out of killing herself.
As an adult, trying to come to grips with her less than conventional childhood, Rosie navigated her way through eating disorders, nude acting roles, mental health issues and awkward Tinder dates. Then she had an epiphany: to stop pretending to be who she wasn’t and embrace her true self — a girl who loved drinking wine in her underpants on Sunday nights — and become an Anti-Cool Girl.
An irrepressible, blackly comic memoir, Rosie Waterland’s story is a clarion call for Anti-Cool Girls everywhere.
