Lena Dunham Got $3.7 Million For This [Book Excerpt]
Lena Dunham secured a cool $3.7 million advance on a planned book, also her first. Gawker has the excerpt that secured her a seven-figure paycheck, and the internet has been buzzing about it for the past 24 hours.
Lena Dunham is the type of celebrity you either love or hate. Fans praise her as a quirky, insightful, witty wunderkind, while her detractors find her overrated and pretentious. We don’t know her personally, so we can’t say for sure, but she does have a fairly impressive resume for a young woman of 26.
In 2010, her film Tiny Furniture (which she wrote and directed) earned significant critical praise, and her HBO program Girls is proving to be a critical darling itself, with four Emmy nods in 2012. Her book, Not That Kind of Girl, is said to be an “advice” tome, which caused a few wrinkled brows.
Now you could say that Random House is jumping the gun by offering Dunham $3.7 million on her first planned book (in case you haven’t caught on,planned is key here). Publishers will usually pay hefty advances to known and proven writers because they are known and proven as writers, and in Dunham’s defense, she is at least partially that, but you can see why there’s been some controversy over the deal.
Gawker didn’t seem terribly impressed with Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl (or what exists of it thus far) calling it “an invitation to get lost in the mind of a girl who is lost in her own mind,” and “literary lifecasting,” and their comments section shredder her even more ruthlessly (but that’s for you to discover).
The Huffington Post called the leaked proposal “compulsive reading,” saying that it “should help build the hype over the book itself,” concluding, “We certainly can’t wait to read it.”
It’s for you to decide whether Gawker is being excessively snarky or if HuffPo is being awkwardly naive about Lena Dunham’s book after you read this excerpt of “choice” quotes (via HuffPo):
“I’m already predicting my future shame at thinking I had anything to offer you, but also my future glory in having stopped you from trying an expensive juice cleanse or thinking that it was your fault when some guy suddenly got weird and defensive talking about your cool interests and job.
“I basically didn’t meet a Republican until I was nineteen, when I shared an ill-fated evening of love-making with our campus’ resident conservative, who worse snakeskin boots and hosted a radio show called The Spin Chamber.
“He was Snidely Whiplash and I was the innocent girl tied to the tracks, but I didn’t want Dudley DoRight to come.
“We had sex once and afterwards Allen wiped his penis on his own curtain, which made me feel I was a veteran of a war too gruesome to tell anyone about.
“My friend Elizabeth put it well when she said ‘I don’t mind the idea of dying but I’m stressed out about the logistics of the whole thing.’ Totally.”
More can be found over at Gawker. What do you think of Lena Dunham’s book? Will it be worth $3.7 million?
