Lena Dunham and the usefulness of remembrance
Plus: The Devil Had a Marketing Budget
Last night I went to the Brooklyn Paramount — such a beautiful venue that makes you feel like you’re a little elf living inside a magical wooden armoire — to see The Maine, a band I was obsessed with in high school and then stopped paying attention to shortly after. What a trip, to confront both the ancient songs that defined one’s coming-of-age and also the seven subsequent albums that they’ve put out in the decade since. You’ve changed! I kept revelling, with equal parts surprise and delight. When they ripped out an old favorite, I laughed out loud at how ridiculous it must have been for any of us to sing “Tell me how to feel like we did when we were young” when we were all still below drinking age. But now! (I’m foreshadowing…)
My humble contribution to the Lena Dunham press tour: for CULTURED magazine’s Cult 100 issue, I visited our favorite girl at her home in New York and had a lovely conversation about her new memoir, Famesick, and her overall oeuvre.
While reading Famesick ahead of our conversation, I found myself having a hugely intense reaction. It becomes unnervingly clear, in Dunham’s telling about her Girls years and what came after, that the kind of success that has made her career a kind of millennial gold standard also carried with it a deeply taxing burden on her health and her relationships, to say nothing of the public scrutiny. As a member of the cohort (confessional New York woman writer, amongst others) expected to aspire toward the Dunhamian template, I found her honesty about its costs almost a little too bracing. Later, I told a friend that the memoir did well to essentially cauterize any latent ambition one could have about wanting to work in Hollywood.
It’s an interesting time for Dunham to invite us to revisit those years with her, at a moment when millennial nostalgia practically dictates the cultural agenda, and also when so many aspects of her ambition are revealed to be startlingly prescient — Girls is nearly flawless, yes, but also remember Lenny Letter, the original magazine-as-longform-newsletter??? (At lunch, we talked about Substack, of course, and how Hannah Horvath would have loved the platform <- a detail that makes it in the piece, though some classic Dunham riffing on Hannah’s Substack life was sadly cut: “She would have published a lot at an aggressive cadence and acted like she was running a media empire, but she would have had between 150-300 followers, and that would have been enough.”)
In our conversation and in Famesick, I found it startling how specific Dunham’s memories of young womanhood can be, whether she was recalling the all-white Betsey Johnson set she wore to prom or other important milestones of the 2010s hipsterdom (A perfect quote also left on the cutting room floor when we were talking about her looking back on her old journals: “I have a diary entry that’s like, ‘I tried this amazing new thing at a place called Iris Cafe in Brooklyn Heights … It’s called ‘avocado toast.’”). These kinds of details, this level of noticing, is what sets her art apart, clearly, but I also would like to think that the resulting cover story helped both of us work out a Theory of Lena Dunham and Girlhood, and the way that remembrance, reimagination, and fictionalization work together to give us the kind of double (or triple, or quintuple, etc.) lives that we as artists have the privilege of pursuing.
Give it a read, then give Famesick a read, and tell me what you think?
Monday night, Chris Murphy brought me as his +1 to The Devil Wears Prada 2 (I thought it was just a press screening and brought heels for fun; found out on the way to Lincoln Center it was the world premiere so shoutout to the heels). You should just read Chris’s report on the event to get a sense for what a grab bag of New York society it was who showed up, or how the premiere resembled a veritable Disneyland of brand activations. (My favorite was either the Zillow-sponsored set with a working “Runway” elevator that you could get inside and then be photographed walking out of, or the Diet Coke station where I think you could get a leather soda can holder custom-embossed. “You’re witnessing luxury in the making,” a sign informed me.)
After the movie — more on that soon — we helped ourselves to the buffet and then wandered around the giiiiiant pavilion they’d set up to enclose the Lincoln Center fountain, so that the interior smelled vaguely of pool as everyone milled about, taking photos and looking longingly toward the VIP section that was curtained off (Inside there: Justin Theroux, Amelia Dimoldenberg, nicer charcuterie plates, a fleet of velvet upholstered furniture). The sensation of all movies as now brands and this particular movie’s marketing budget was overpowering; later when I went home — me and my branded Tweezerman tweezers took the train — I read Coleman Spilde’s Salon piece about the campaign, which directed me to the original movie’s original 2006 trailer, which as Spilde points out, was essentially a 3-min clip of just one perfect scene, barely edited down. Less used to be more, it seems.
Some questions I have today…
They’ve unleashed TMZ upon DC; could this quite possibly be good for the nation? Have we ever thrown two apex predator institutions like TMZ and the federal government in a pit together like this?
I'm so fascinated by the (loud!) buzz surrounding Dunham's new memoir, which I'm eager to read. I love real, raw, authenticity in telling one's stories.
Loved the over-the-topness of the LA status anxiety story. NYC cannot compete. I think the difference is we all walk the same streets.