A Year in Reading: Tess Malone

2014 has been a year of transition for me. After 19 years of being a student, I graduated with my master’s in journalism from the University of Missouri in May. By the end of the month, I moved to Atlanta, a city I had only been to twice before. And in the beginning of June, I started work as a copy editor for a magazine. Yes, I’m a single girl living on her own in the bright, big city and working in journalism — my life is a romantic comedy waiting for Ryan Gosling to arrive.

Although my books were some of the first things I unpacked when I got to my new apartment, considering I close read for a living now, I haven’t had much time to read for fun. But the books I did read fell into a certain category: young women trying to figure out their place in a new world (I wonder why?). My new city survived two historic fires and is often a backdrop in apocalyptic TV shows and movies, so I didn’t have a hard time getting sucked into Edan Lepucki’s California and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. Edan’s end of the world is shockingly intimate and real — and all the more terrifying because of this. I loved both Cal and Frida even though they stubbornly tried to get me not to, and I decided my artifact would be a beer opener. Emily’s dystopia is visceral yet hopeful — the kind that keeps you up late to read more. Yet the most provocative book in this category wasn’t in a not-so-distant and bleak future, it was immediate and raw. The best book I read in 2014 was Lena Dunham’s Not that Kind of Girl.

I should note that I started off 2014 trying to absorb all of the wit and wisdom in The Most of Nora Ephron, but half a year later, I needed someone more relatable, someone who didn’t have it all. After all, the title of Lena’s book is about defining yourself by what you aren’t, my favorite and most detrimental 20-something hobby. Yet in Lena, I found a girl who made the same mistakes I had or even worse, but she could write about it with a humor, vulnerability, and the self-awareness that was missing from Hannah Horvath. But like her alter ego, Lena doesn’t apologize for who she is even as she admits some terribly intimate secrets and character flaws, and this is why she is both one of the strongest voices in film and, now, evidently, in writing. Plus, the book is hilarious. Whether you like her or not, Lena Dunham is a new literary voice to be reckoned with — cutting, funny, and sometimes brutal.