Dunham in New York on November 2. Photo: Gillian Laub One morning, about three weeks after we’d first met, Lena Dunham sent me ten text messages in a row. She was in the hospital, recovering from a procedure to remove her right ovary, “which was encased in scar tissue & fibrosis, attached to my bowel and pressing on nerves that made it kinda hard to walk/pee/vamp,” as she’d later explain on Instagram.
She sent texts to supplement conversations we’d already had in person, texts that answered questions she thought I’d probably ask in the next interview. She expressed disappointment with negative reviews of Camping, the HBO show she co-wrote with her Girls partner, Jenni Konner, and, days later, refused to be bummed by bad Camping reviews. She Skyped into the new writers’ room for a show she’s developing for HBO about a grifter heiress, and sent me a screenshot of the first session.
“I’d have to say, I do feel pretty good here,” she says, offering me three chilled-beverage options from the fridge one September afternoon. Right now, there are purple snakeskin poufs, leopard-print rugs, and bright-green walls. There’s a tiny pink room, called the “Lady Room,” filled with memorabilia: a framed teen glamour shot of a pubescent Dunham in a Nicole Miller blazer, lip-printed pottery she made at Color Me Mine and wanted to sell on Etsy, Eloise posters.
“You can say a lot of shit about me, but I am a very committed pet owner,” Dunham says. “Ask anybody who works with me on a pet level.” When Dunham quickly got very famous and powerful — on-the-cover-of-Vogue famous, star-maker-in-her-own-right powerful — that dynamic replicated itself on a larger scale. Cannot stand that main girl. In a way, she dared it all to happen, the insane expectations and attention.
Dunham lists the reasons for the hate — with her explanations for why she is the way she is — as if she were reciting a poem imprinted on her brain in grade school: She grew up privileged in New York, which led to what people perceive as a sense of entitlement. Her parents are Soho art-scene royalty, and she was raised around “very specific, liberal provocateurs,” who taught her she could say things that “might now warrant a trigger warning,” which informs her sense of humor.
Mostly, right now, she’s trying to figure out who post-Girls Dunham is and how, maybe, she can distance herself from the meta-version of Lena Dunham that has overshadowed the work in recent years. But as she texts me increasingly intimate details that she knows I’ll put in this article, as if she were trying to be the director of her own candid, sympathy-generating magazine story, I begin to wonder if Lena Dunham, the performance artist daring us to hate her, is the work.
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