10.21.26
We used to watch in my office on Sunday nights, huddled together at the Sports Illustrated offices on the 32nd floor of the former Time Inc. building in midtown back when 26-year-old fact-checkers had their own individual offices.
There were no commercials so there was to be no talking. As soon as the episode would wrap, my co-worker and friend would leave, and maybe an hour later, after some quiet time alone, we’d talk via Gchat about what we saw and heard during the show.
If memory serves, after Season 1’s finale aired, we blocked off two hours the next afternoon to talk about things. It was all purposefully dramatic and ridiculous. But that’s the effect the show had. We felt part of it, even two straight-ish guys who were only tangentially the target audience.
And now it’s back.
Girls, the 2010s HBO show that ruled the world for pretty much everyone in their twenties at the time and who spent half their days on Twitter, is coming back for a five-episode reboot sometime next year or the year after. Probably the year after. Television reboots and reunion shows of this sort are often forced and cringe-worthy in all the wrong ways, providing so much second-hand embarrassment that you turn off the TV and go take a burning hot shower.
This Girls reboot may do that too, nothing should shock us anymore, but my guess is that it won’t, that this particular installment of the format will work because what this show has that others don’t is Lena Dunham, and what this person continues to put out into the world is typically more brilliant than not. It started withTiny Furniture in 2010, followed by Girls, followed by a bunch of stuff that, even alone, would qualify as career-defining for most people: New Yorker essays; directing the Industry pilot; creating a bunch of other TV stuff; more glossy magazine essays; NYT sit-downs. Surely there’s other stuff I’m missing or that didn’t get greenlit for one reason or another.
And earlier this year, Dunham published “Famesick,” a 416-page memoir that looked back at her career so far, along with her catapult to fame. The book kept me reading late into the night on the floor of my newborn’s room, forgetting more than once that I needed to make sure he was still breathing. It’s one of those non-fiction books with stories you mostly know but can’t wait to hear them again and again. I think I could read about Dunham getting lunch with Nora Ephron or waiting for a text back from Adam Driver for the rest of my life.
There’s so much in the memoir that I enjoyed, the Ephron and Driver scenes among them, as well as her time in rehab, in doctor’s offices, even the scenes she describes catching a cab in the dead of winter on Hudson and Canal.
And while much of the book is about her very creative and very fraught relationship with Girls co-creator Jenni Konner, from my view, the book’s real thrust is that of her evolving relationship with her parents, namely her mother.
Consider this passage midway through the book that discusses Dunham’s fame, fortune and art surpassing her mother’s, a longtime sculptor and painter:
We never discussed it. To name this would be to cop to an ugly emotion, directed at an even uglier target—her own child. Neither of us had the words to explain that multiple things could be true at once: She could be proud of me, worried, and also maddened that her entire professional life and legacy had now been yoked to her child's. I could feel empathy for how that affected her, and also feel sad that the incredible effort I'd made to make her proud was met with a constant low-level shrug. But to express any of this skillfully would only be possible with the kind of high-level, egoless communication that rarely defines the mother-daughter bond.
As a result, we had both stopped assuming that the other one wished us well. We could no longer rely on the other's good intentions, which I've learned is the hardest thing to come back from. We had gone from being spicy allies to performatively polite enemies, afraid to give the other any ammunition by expressing our own vulnerability.
The magic here, and in all of her work, seems to be that she’s unwilling to make anything that isn’t, first and foremost, for herself. She isn’t making anything comfortable for you and me to read and see. Review that passage from the book again. Was that for us? Not really. The words were for herself, a letter to be left on the kitchen counter for her mother to read, shred, piece back together, and think about for the next three weeks before broaching the subject with a short text message. That’s why what she does almost always works no matter the medium. Dunham gives herself to us by choosing words and creating scenes with the intention of amusing and satisfying herself before anyone else, all the while clearing a tantalizingly high creative bar she self-selects. She surely wants her work to be liked and well-received, don’t get me wrong, but I suspect that the only critic that truly matters to her is the one that follows her wherever she goes.
The result is art that you can’t stop thinking about. A raw intensity emanates when she tells you what she’s thinking, and there seems to be very little she’s leaving out. Sometimes that stuff is scary and rude and cuts so deep that you bleed, but she’s bleeding too, so it’s usually okay. Her bravery is shared and we’re all better off for having gone through it. And when we cut to black and the lights come on, it becomes clear that what we’ve been watching all along is a genius at work.