Not That Kind of Girl received mixed reviews but was a commercial success, reaching number two on
The New York Times Best Seller list on October 19, 2014.
Sloane Crosley for
The New York Times said the book was often hilarious but not ground-breaking in content. Crosley cautioned that attempts to view Dunham as a bellwether of modern feminism would unfairly overshadow the author.
Hadley Freeman, in a review for
The Guardian, described Dunham as being a smart and talented writer, and the book as being brutally honest, but also narcissistic and thin in experience. In
The New Republic,
James Wolcott found the book filled with "chatty punch lines, airy anecdotage, and sour kiss-offs" and, ultimately, "callow, grating, and glibly nattering." Heidi Stevens of
PopMatters wrote, "But the book, as a whole, is a lovely, touching, surprisingly sentimental portrait of a woman who, despite repeatedly baring her body and soul to audiences, remains a bit of an enigma: a young woman who sets the agenda, defies classification and seems utterly at home in her own skin." Leah Greenblatt of
Entertainment Weekly gave the book a "B+" and that it was "guided mostly by a
Woody-Allen-with-a-uterus kind of whimsy." == Controversy ==