Lena Dunham, a genius at work

10.21.26

We used to watch Girls in my office on Sunday nights. Dan and I, huddled in a not-small room at the Sports Illustrated offices on the 32nd floor of the former Time Inc. building in midtown, the days when 26-year-old fact-checkers would have their own individual not-small offices in Manhattan with a south-facing view of Seventh Avenue and Rockefeller Center. (This wasn’t that long ago!) Dan would shuffle down to my office, about 8:55 p.m., and he’d slowly close the sliding door behind him. We were not pretending to do any work. If anyone asked us what we were doing, we’d tell them: we are watching Girls on HBO. The magazine had the longstanding perk of providing small televisions to help us monitor sports news and world events, and we did that most days, but we also spent a lot of time with Titanic and The Office and Keeping Up With the Kardashians on in the background. I know I watched the Breaking Bad finale on that TV.

And we watched Girls on Sunday nights starting in 2012 and beyond. (We had to work Sundays in those days; the magazine schedule was what it was.)

There were of course no commercials so there was to be no talking. We preferred it that way. As soon as the episode would wrap, Dan 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, and the conversation would typically spill into the next day. If memory serves, after Season 1’s finale aired, we blocked off two or three hours the next afternoon to talk about the things that Lena Dunham had made us think about. I loved that job and I loved that not-small office and I loved Dan (still do; he’s alive and well) and I loved watching Girls in that office. We watched subsequent seasons the same way, many human hours and many more discussing what it all meant, for us, and for everyone else. 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 shower and sit with your thoughts and wonder when you’ll die, hopefully not soon, but maybe sooner than most people your age.

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 all this, 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, 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. She can somehow bring the mundane moments of life to life; I think that’s in part what makes Girls so great.

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 I took a picture of. (Start with “We never discussed it…”)

Perhaps Dunham was right about herself all along: maybe she is the voice of this generation.

The magic here, and in all of her work, seems to be that she’s unwilling to make anything that isn’t, first, 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 mom to read, shred, piece back together, and think about for the next three weeks before broaching the subject with a short text message on a Wednesday afternoon. 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, one that when we finally get around to seeing all we can do is stare into the sky in wonder. She wants 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 in the room wherever she goes.

The result is art that you can’t stop thinking about. She makes you think about things because she’s being honest when she tells you what she’s thinking — there’s very little hidden and what is will come out later, so hang tight. Sometimes this stuff is scary and rude and cuts so deep that you bleed, but she’s bleeding too, so it’s okay. Her bravery becomes ours to share and we’re better off with the scar. 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.

I can’t wait to see the new show. I should call Dan.