Kindle highlights from Lena Dunham's Not That Kind of Girl

Over the last several years, Lena Dunham has built a career on candid musings and unabashed oversharing. Whether helming the Emmy-nominated HBO series Girls as its creator and star, rallying against its endless critics, or speaking out about feminism on screen and off, Dunham has always confronted the world on her own terms. Her best-selling debut memoir, 2014’s Not That Kind of Girl, shares the same sort of pointed resilience, recounting her then-28 years of bad sex, clumsy romance, and millennial misfires with hilarious detail and sharp self-awareness.

In honor of Women’s History Month, Amazon has shared the top Kindle highlights from the book. Check them out below.

• “When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself.”
• “You will find,” she says, “that there’s a certain grace to having your heart broken.” I will use this line many times in the years to come, giving it as a gift to anyone who needs it.”
• “You’ve learned a new rule and it’s simple: don’t put yourself in situations you’d like to run away from.”
• “The end never comes when you think it will. It’s always ten steps past the worst moment, then a weird turn to the left.
• “Being treated like shit is not an amusing game or a transgressive intellectual experiment. It’s something you accept, condone, and learn to believe you deserve. This is so simple. But I tried so hard to make it complicated.”
• “But I also think when we embark on intimate relationships, we make a basic human promise to be decent, to hold a flattering mirror up to each other, to be respectful as we explore each other.”
• “There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman. As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren’t needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter. That personal writing by women is no more than an exercise in vanity and that we should appreciate this new world for women, sit down, and shut up.”
• “They would like me enough that it wouldn’t matter if I liked myself. They would see the good in me so that I could, too.”
• “And now I come to him, whole and ready to be known differently. Life is long, people change, I would never be foolish enough to think otherwise. But no matter what, nothing can ever be as it was. Everything has changed in a way that sounds trite and borderline offensive when recounted over coffee. I can never be who I was. I can simply watch her with sympathy, understanding, and some measure of awe. There she goes, backpack on, headed for the subway or the airport. She did her best with her eyeliner. She learned a new word she wants to try out on you. She is ambling along. She is looking for it.”
• “I was a working woman. I deserved kisses. I deserved to be treated like a piece of meat but also respected for my intellect.”