Lena Dunham, one of New York City’s worst exports, is back with a new memoir — and the media is treating her like a returning hero.
Trust me: Dunham is particularly, specifically awful.
She is unwell. She tells us in so many ways in Famesick, the book she’s currently promoting on podcasts, TV, in magazines and newspapers, and on a book tour, which she conducts while reclining on stage — in bed.
Dunham has, by all accounts, eaten herself into morbid obesity before age 40, yet is considered by The New York Times and others to be a generational oracle, a font of insight, an artist for the ages.
Why? Because she created and starred in a buzzy show on HBO years ago that, Dunham now admits, fewer than one million people per week watched.
Given that the central preoccupations of Girls tracked with Dunham’s, it is little wonder why.
Turns out most of America had zero interest in watching a slovenly, unhygienic, overweight twenty-something spoiled brat — Hannah Horvath, played by Dunham — engage in degrading sex, whine about her lack of stardom and demand her parents subsidize her life as an ‘artist’ in Brooklyn.
The media coverage of Girls, and Dunham, was always outsized. It bore zero relation to the small cultural impact the show actually had — and, in the years since, Dunham has yet to generate a film or show that’s had a sliver of that modest success.
But yet again, the media — from The Guardian to Elle magazine to the Today show, the Times of London, The Atlantic, New York magazine and far too many others to count — has anointed Dunham a misunderstood genius wronged by a misogynistic, fat-phobic world.
I argue the opposite: It’s the media that willingly misunderstands Lena Dunham.
A brief recap of Dunham’s worst offenses:
In her 2014 memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, for which she received a reported $3.7 million advance, Dunham falsely smeared a classmate named Barry as the man she claims raped her when she was at Oberlin, a liberal arts college in Ohio.
Oh, and she made sure to include this salient detail: Barry was a Republican.
Reporters quickly identified an Oberlin alumnus named Barry who fit her description. The only problem? He’d never met Dunham. And yet it took weeks of pleading, and the threat of a lawsuit, before Dunham and her publisher agreed to add a disclaimer to her book – that ‘Barry’ was a pseudonym.
‘Why didn’t you clear my name?’ Barry later asked Dunham. ‘Why did you wait? Why did I have to set up a legal fund and threaten to sue in order for action to be taken?’
Because Lena is the worst, Barry. Because Lena Dunham is the worst thing to happen to feminism, pop culture and the arts in a very long time.
Dunham also wrote about obsessing over her baby sister Grace — who now goes by the name Cyrus and identifies as ‘transmasculine nonbinary’ — to an alarming degree.
She writes in Famesick that she’s now sorry — not about what she did or what she wrote, but that ‘a conservative media site analyzed the book carefully, pulling choice passages and coming to the conclusion that I had engaged in sexually inappropriate childhood behavior with my sibling.’
It’s always someone else’s fault with Lena.
She wrote about masturbating in bed next to her sister when they were children, of pulling apart her sister’s legs and looking up inside when Lena was 7 and Grace was one – and, so that Lena can’t accuse me of misrepresenting her, here is a passage from Not That Kind of Girl that Dunham wrote about Grace:
‘As she grew, I took to bribing her time and affection: one dollar in quarters if I could do her makeup like a ‘motorcycle chick.’ Three pieces of candy if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds. Whatever she wanted to watch on TV if she would just ‘relax on me.’ Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl, I was trying.’
Lena also dumped her rescue dog of many years, a dog she paraded in the pages of Vogue, when, she claims, he suddenly became too unruly. Along with her then-producing partner Jenni Konner, Dunham was also forced to apologize in 2017 after writing an open letter defending a Girls writer named Murray Miller, who had been accused of rape by the daughter of a well-known actor.
‘While our first instinct is to listen to every woman’s story,’ they wrote, ‘our insider knowledge of Murray’s situation makes us confident that sadly this accusation is one of the 3 percent of assault cases that are misreported every year.’
Some feminist.
Miller was never charged with a crime and the blowback from that statement alone was startling enough that soon Konner, described by Lena as her best friend, parted ways with Dunham.
But now Dunham is back, and the media is asking her about none of this.
Nor are they asking about her patently unhealthy lifestyle, or why, as she wrote in a Vogue essay, she had her uterus removed against all best medical advice.
Why did she write sex scenes in Girls that utterly degraded and humiliated the beautiful actresses that she cast?
Why, as she writes in Famesick, would she steal her mother’s journals, read them, and use them for material without asking permission?
Why out her ex-boyfriend, music producer Jack Antonoff, for getting too close to a ‘teen pop star’ Dunham refuses to name, but who we all know?
She tries to make Antonoff look terrible, writing in Famesick that he showed up two hours after her hysterectomy — again, one that doctors told her was unnecessary — ‘with some bodega flowers… wearing hotel slippers and Bermuda shorts, a hoodie covered in patches.’
TEAM JACK. Imagine what this guy lived through.
Lastly: If she really doesn’t want to be famous — the title of her book says it all, and she compares what she calls the ‘condition’ of fame, to the condition of being sick — there’s only one remaining question.
Why won’t Lena Dunham go away?
