00:00:08.820And whether we like it or not, we're in bid with the right.
00:00:13.820So, Moira, we should explain how this episode came about.
00:00:18.380This has a long genesis, which was prolonged by my travels.
00:00:23.040We had been planning to do this a long time ago, but I was in Europe and my Wi-Fi just kind of sucked.
00:00:27.460This has got to be, like, the world's least appealing excuse. Like, sorry, we were going to record an episode and get it to you guys, but Adrian was in Spain eating ice cream and touring the Alhambra with his, like, beautiful family.
00:04:03.200eyes grow up figure it out so that's right today we are talking about drumroll lena dunham yeah
00:04:13.200and i think i think of this as a kind of a perverse companion episode to our marilyn monroe episodes
00:04:19.740right a few weeks ago we talked about a woman who was as you said the woman and today we're
00:04:24.900talking about a woman who was sort of an abject of the late aughts to mid-2010s a person people
00:04:31.960projected everything about a certain kind of very young woman onto, specifically immaturity.0.75
00:04:37.600She was the woman who was not allowed to be a woman. She was the absolute girl in some way.0.93
00:04:42.080Yeah, you know, she's a comedy auteur, but she was really defined very strongly by her youth,
00:04:48.720by her childishness. And that was a sort of marker that was placed on her throughout the 2010s.
00:04:56.260and it made her a magnet for controversy
00:04:59.060and for a symbolism that she couldn't quite carry, right?
00:05:02.200She was a person with deep and, I think, real personal flaws,
00:05:06.700and she's also somebody who reveals in everybody else's
00:05:12.380very animated and extreme reactions to her
00:05:15.200some of our own cultural pathologies as well, right?
00:05:18.020Like, it's very easy to say, like, what's wrong with Lena Dunham.
00:05:21.420I think it's harder and maybe more interesting,
00:05:23.240and something we're going to try to show today
00:05:25.120It's like, what does Lena Dunham tell us about ourselves?
00:05:28.880And I think one thing we should mention, both of us read her new memoir, Fame Sick, in preparation for this episode.
00:05:36.220And one of the things I looked at, sort of the discourse around this book, and it's possible that the pathology and the moment that you're describing, which I agree was really interesting and really deeply telling, seems to have passed.
00:05:48.560I feel like the reception of her book has been marked by none of the kerfuffles that would attend to anything Dunham uttered in her heyday.
00:05:59.760If anything, people seem to be kind of doing a reassessment.
00:06:03.520She's being kind of treated like an elder stateswoman.
00:06:05.600And I have to say that like even reading the memoir, I thought of it as someone who had the same way that Olivia Nuzzi's book probably should have been released, you know, in five years and might have been potentially interesting then after like 10 more passes with their editor.
00:06:22.600This is a book that comes out at the right time precisely because it seems like she's done the exact right amount of thinking about it.
00:06:29.380I must say, I didn't love reading every part of it, but I thought it was a book that was very much the work of someone who had grappled with her own legacy.
00:06:39.760It just felt like she could look back in a way that would have been impossible in 2016, 2017.
00:06:46.340Yeah, and I think it's also interesting that for Lena Dunham, this is somebody who also wrote the Too Fast book when she was still in the middle of it, right?
00:07:00.900Her first memoir, which was put out right at the time that Girls was sort of at the height of its, like, sort of hegemonic monoculture importance, right?
00:07:11.260And I will say Not That Kind of Girl has moments that are actually quite poignant.
00:07:15.080Like, this is the kind of really frustrating thing about Lena Dunham.
00:07:17.700So just when you want to write her off, she will say something really kind of disarmingly wise or just like accurate and perceptive in a way that kind of knocks you out of your comfortable dismissal of her.
00:07:33.340I think this is part of her staying power. Right. But also she is a person who, in the midst of that and sort of intention and contrast with that perennial wisdom is also incredibly annoying and oblivious and self-absorbed in a lot of ways, in ways that I want to be clear, I think are very, very similar to my own personality.
00:07:52.120But, like, Not That Kind of Girl was a book that had a lot of things in it that I wonder if she would have phrased differently now.
00:08:00.580Like, I got to see her telling some of those same stories at about 40 and then having told them again at, you know, like 26 or whatever age she was in 2014.
00:08:35.980She's working a lot as a director and a producer, but not as much in front of cameras very much anymore, which I think is kind of a shame, actually, because she's a really talented performer.
00:08:44.440But I think also there was a big desire at the height of girls to take Lena Dunham down a peg because her success and her wealth were very much understood as undeserved and her sort of personality flaws were made into symbols of the flaws of like the industry and creative industries and how, you know, unfair the distribution of money in this country and opportunity in those worlds are.
00:09:10.120And that was kind of a little too much for one person, I think, to be assigned.
00:16:35.340And Girls runs for six seasons, ending in 2017.
00:16:39.640I'll get to my experience with this show later on.
00:16:41.760But like, I watched sort of the first three of those seasons before researching for this episode.
00:16:47.860And after that, Dunham kind of retreats for a while.
00:16:51.460And while that's not the official reason for this new memoir, that's clearly one of the things people go to the book for, to explain what exactly happened to her in the meantime.
00:17:03.920As you say, she's not inactive, but measured against the omni, maybe overpresence of the years 2012 to 2017, there's been a lot, Leslina Dunham, to go around.
00:17:15.560And this book kind of explains which health, personal and professional reasons there are for this.
00:17:21.600Yeah, she calls her memoir fame sick, right? And it's kind of this allusion to the fact that the book is both about her time being famous and her like simultaneous time being physically and it becomes clear also like quite mentally unwell.
00:17:37.680So, yeah, she was this, like, hated auteur, TV and film director, with a very distinctive voice.
00:17:43.460I would call her, like, a Jane Austen-style social satire, comedy of manners sort of thing,0.60
00:17:49.560crossed with, like, a very specific Jewish mid-century-inflected Borscht belt self-deprecation.
00:17:56.060She comes from the New York art world.0.74
00:20:15.220And it's like, wait, like you're 25 at this point in the story.
00:20:18.440Like, why are you, why did you think your parents should be there?
00:20:20.620But, like, there's a kind of immaturity, not just to her persona, but, like, to the personality that I can see why that would create on people.
00:20:29.000It's definitely one of the funnier, I think, involuntary running gags of the book that, like, her parents are with her at things that parents really, like, don't need to be at anymore.
00:20:38.500And that she's like, and my parents were out of town.
00:20:47.220Yeah, I was reading about like her dependence on her parents and their sense of like obligation to be involved in her life, like well into her adulthood.0.74
00:20:56.780And it made me grateful that I grew up in a traditional American family, by which I mean the kind where everybody hates each other.
00:21:04.060There's just no way that I would have been like so heavily reliant on my parents at the age that Lena Dunham was.
00:21:11.580But she was, you know, clearly a very loved child.
00:26:47.820In many cases, the blind spots of a show like Girls are still the blind spots of fame sick, except I think in the two terms that are in the title.
00:26:59.560The way she's thought about fame and the way she's thought about illness, to me, are really the impressive parts of this book where you can sort of tell this is a person who's not only gone through a lot of stuff, but has genuinely kind of tried to grapple with it.
00:27:14.000I agree with you that like the way she deals with the sexual assault allegation, right?
00:27:19.100Like she is like, oh, I was on drugs and Jenny did it.
00:27:22.120And it's like, oh my God, are you kidding me with this?
00:27:24.260But when she's, for instance, there's this amazing thing she talks about where she's
00:27:28.480like, well, that fame-like sickness has this maddening circularity, which like, first you're
00:27:51.880One of the things you learn in the book, which I must say I didn't realize because I only watched her kind of project that didn't follow her in any way.
00:28:01.660She read all the things people said about her.
00:28:04.980She participated in those exact discourses that sort of both built her up and then took her down.
00:28:10.820And I feel like she's a really interesting window into that media environment precisely because she was both a master at it and is now realizing just how much she was at its mercy.
00:28:21.200Oh, yeah. No, I think she knew the whole time. I think she knew.
00:28:24.220It's like part of what's really interesting is like she couldn't control her own fame while it was at its peak, right?
00:28:31.320she couldn't make people like her and she kept on trying long after it became clear or should
00:28:40.200have become clear that that was an impossible task and that effort to sort of explain herself
00:28:46.480kept further putting her foot in her mouth right and this is the kind of thing that could get
00:28:50.820played for comedy but in her telling really seems quite tragic you know and this is the part where
00:28:55.620i i kind of sympathize with her i feel for her is that she had this like great longing to be
00:28:59.900understood was constantly misunderstood and the more she tried to make herself clear the angrier
00:29:04.360everybody got at her i think that you have to find something about just like the comedy of the human
00:29:09.620condition in that even if it's actual particulars like okay this is all playing out in a profile in
00:29:15.840the cut you know is a little unrelatable to most of us yeah so like a decade after like the end of
00:29:22.520girls just about there's this like reassessment at play and we're seeing a pattern play out with
00:29:27.840Lena Dunham that we've seen before with other figures like Anna Nicole Smith or like Tanya
00:29:32.800Harding. It's the collective soul searching and apology, right? I think a lot about like the
00:29:39.240You're Wrong About, one of our friend podcasts, Friends of the Show, by the great Sarah Marshall,
00:29:43.940who sort of helps usher in this pattern with a lot of people with their series on the wrong women
00:29:49.000of the 90s, right? It's a cultural reconsideration of the misogyny that a wronged prominent woman1.00
00:29:57.680of the past was victimized with and that cycle has become kind of a genre unto itself yeah something
00:30:04.280that supplements or provides a coda to the original moment of misogyny rather than actually
00:30:09.260preventing that misogyny right like what you said earlier like oh olivia nazi should have waited five
00:30:14.260or ten years to write a book like american canto and that's not just because you know she's too
00:30:19.340close to the events to see them clearly although she definitely is it's also because what she wants
00:30:24.500to do like reorient the public story so that she's not the villain anymore is something that
00:30:31.000you need like a fallow period in order to achieve in the public imagination right so like Lena Dunham1.00
00:30:36.080has her timing a lot better right yeah like Monica Lewinsky had her timing right like she was able to0.91
00:30:42.300do that for herself and like Lena Dunham is sort of fitting herself into this groove this cultural
00:30:51.480groove it's like okay i'm a woman i was famous you all were really horrible to me are you ready
00:30:58.580to say sorry now yeah and it's different in lena's case in that she's sort of initiated this pattern
00:31:04.840herself right yeah it's not just that one enterprising young female journalist a sarah
00:31:09.740marshall or a hannah horvath if you will uh who had this like hot take this is one from the past
00:31:15.680got a raw deal, right? It is Lena herself identifying this pattern and seeking to set
00:31:21.000it in motion with her own work. And you could call that cynical, but I also think it's kind
00:31:26.440of savvy. She's an excellent reader of the zeitgeist. She's a keen observer of genre.
00:31:32.440She talks about how she was psychologically ruined by Googling herself, right? But in a way,
00:31:37.740this kind of coverage that we're doing here, this very episode, dear listener,
00:31:41.780is, I think, exactly what she had in mind when she wrote Fame Sick, right?
00:31:46.380For better or worse, she knows that we are exactly as interested in her as she is.
00:31:53.240So her early life, as we mentioned, born 1986 in New York City to, you know,
00:32:00.760the kind of artists who own a loft, very successful, kind of a wealthy family.
00:32:04.380It seems like her dad was a scion of a wealthy family from Connecticut,
00:32:09.720and her mom was more of like a hardscrabble tail.
00:32:14.880But they're very successful by the time she's born.
00:32:54.780They would go up to, I think it's like Litchfield County where they had this like summer home in Connecticut and they'd spend the summers there and they'd host big parties there with these fancy people, right?
00:33:06.060But she never had to do what, like, if your parents don't have, like, these educations or these arts backgrounds, like, and you're a, you know, creatively ambitious kid.
00:33:17.940Like, what I, for instance, had to do, which was, like, use my one hour of computer time every afternoon to, like, reinvent the Velvet Underground from first principles.0.99
00:33:25.280You know, she didn't have to do that shit.0.97
00:33:27.160She got all of this information, all of this lineage.0.99
00:39:56.640I remember it feeling very unusual and very unique at the time.
00:40:02.180But today the show feels actually quite conventional.
00:40:05.480Not necessarily in a bad way, just it's an accomplished TV comedy, right?
00:40:09.700It wears its mumble core and its sort of indie influences quite lightly, right?
00:40:15.360It's a New York show about nothing, itself kind of a long tradition, right?
00:40:19.560It's a hangout comedy that very clearly bespeaks sort of the Apatow influence.
00:40:24.480And it usually, like episodes in the first couple of seasons really tend to consist of this burst of super short vignettes full of observational humor, right?
00:40:33.920Like it'll be a scene where like people may exchange four or five sentences and then we cut over to the next group and see what they're up to.
00:40:40.860It's something that a lot of HBO shows had in the 2010s, right?
00:40:44.540I'm thinking here of like high maintenance or looking, but also like Broad City and Comedy Central has that, Difficult People on Hulu has that.
00:40:53.300And of course, these probably were influenced by girls, but it's also, I think, just kind of the influence of the sort of the stoner and slacker comedy.
00:41:00.540The ADHD is sort of part of the way the whole thing is constructed.
00:41:04.300But in some way, like, of course, that is in itself, or at least was in 2012, still gender bending or genre bending, right?0.65
00:41:12.540The stoner hangout comedy tended to be either an all-male affair or it tended to be, you know, sort of a mixed gender affair.
00:41:21.380Like the fact that these are just women usually hanging out and doing nothing and talking about nothing and having these like bizarre mini crises that aren't really crises.0.64
00:41:31.960Like that was an unusual thing to have in a show that was centering women, especially young women at the time.0.55
00:41:38.980And it then, of course, like with shows like Broad City becomes like kind of canonic.
00:45:45.340is a sign of how mature he's going to become as a performer.
00:45:48.040And again, I think Hannah Dunham actually is a very, very good actress.
00:45:51.020It's like, it's not something people talk about
00:45:52.780because she's known primarily as like the creator and main writer of this show, right?
00:45:56.440But her performances as Hannah are actually much more like accomplished
00:46:00.560and like subtle than I think a lot of people notice.
00:46:03.160The other thing that's interesting is that like a lot of these little subplots
00:46:06.160are very cute and very fun, but I forgot all of them.
00:46:09.360The ones that the buzzy episodes also do this intergenerational thing,
00:46:14.000But as the show goes on, Dunham clearly loves going for these, I think in Hollywood they call them two-handers, right?
00:46:20.360Like where it's usually her and one older performer, essentially for the whole episode, maybe not quite.
00:46:28.820There's one in season two with her and Patrick Wilson.
00:46:32.260There are other people in the episode, but like I would say about 15 minutes out of the 22 minutes are just them having a lot of sex and having a lot of debates and like, you know.0.99
00:46:42.600They're very talky episodes. They tend to be sort of like capsule episodes where the plot that happens there will not be referenced again and none of the other characters or their problems are intervening. Right. And it's long conversations that are often sort of stand ins for bigger conversations happening in the zeitgeist. Right. So like American Bitch in season six is probably the most famous one.0.91
00:47:05.060And that's, you know, I think it comes out before the advent of what we call the Me Too movement, but sort of after the beginning of some, like, sexual assault agitations on college campuses that preceded the Me Too movement from, like, 2012 on, right?
00:47:17.180That's a sexual violence and, like, sexual exploitation episode.
00:47:20.600And then One Man's Trash is, like, I find it kind of sweet, even though it's, like, a little sad.
00:47:25.120It's about this sort of like tiny whirlwind affair she has with an older man and she's sort of like looking at his financial security and the sort of like adultness of his life and sort of envying it and also not really understanding it or feeling incapable of achieving it.
00:47:42.880It's interesting that you focus on how these two-hander episodes and so many of the other episodes have these sort of like generational confrontations.
00:47:50.020Yeah. Something that's unique about Girls is that it was positioned as sort of like the generational advent, right? Lena Dunham was made a stand in for millennial talent writ large and for millennial aspiration. And I think also like a lot of these episodes reflect what would become like a broader theme of the millennial story, such as it is just like frustration with the inability to get into these institutions and to get into these positions of prestige.
00:48:16.500because the boomers and the Gen X people
00:48:56.400Yeah, well, no, he's when he's visiting college campuses, sort of like he's a famous writer who like hooks up with undergraduates in like ways that feel less than consensual when he goes to speak at colleges.0.75
00:49:09.900And he wants to confront her and she sort of goes there.
00:49:13.800and it's very clear she's sort of out of her element
00:49:57.140You know, what also seems interesting to me about girls,
00:49:59.960and one reason why I think like you actually kind of0.95
00:50:02.220couldn't make a show quite like this today,
00:50:05.080is that it completely takes for granted1.00
00:50:06.660all the achievements of second wave feminism, right?0.99
00:50:10.000Such as able to complain about the inadequacy of those advancements or sort of like mock the inadequacy of those advancements in women's status.0.99
00:50:18.340Like, I think kind of because it's not afraid of losing them.
00:50:36.760It just, like, is a precondition of their world that you can get an abortion, that you can, like, have casual sex and be able to get your STD treated if you get one.
00:50:44.820There's the same thing with workforce participation, right?0.54
00:50:47.180The conflict in their lives is not about, like, whether women can work.0.94
00:50:52.840It's about how the work that is available to them is, like, sort of unfulfilling and undignified.0.84
00:51:00.140It's a show that presumes, as a banality, women's access to the public sphere and to independent life.1.00
00:51:05.820And so it's about like investigating how an adult life is formed like from there.
00:51:10.540Like there's a scene in season one where Hannah has a kind of like crummy job at a law firm and she's groped by her boss.0.92
00:51:17.900And then in the bathroom, her two co-workers like do her eyebrows really silly and they make her look ridiculous.
00:51:23.040And they tell her like, don't worry about the groping because he's a nice guy.0.90
00:51:26.300And it's a great scene about the indignity of a young woman's professional life, right?
00:51:29.980Both undignified because of the circumstances that are imposed on her, like sexual harassment, but also undignified because of her own insecurity and incompetence and immaturity and lack of self-awareness where she doesn't know to do something like say, hey, please don't do my eyebrows like that.
00:51:47.740Because organized misogynists online and in public life and in the White House would take that scene as evidence of women's unfitness for public life, right?
00:51:56.340So I think a lot about like that TikTok video that went viral of these like young Australian women who are working in a skincare company and they like did a viral dance in their office.
00:52:05.640If you Google like Gen Z boss in a mini, they like all go around and they like make little jokes about their outfits.0.76
00:52:12.060Oh, my God. I cannot believe you've missed this because it was absolutely insane on the right wing Twitter.
00:52:18.040They were like, this is why we need to lock women in the kitchens and use them as breeding whores and like take away the right to vote like because of Gen Z boss in a mini.0.96
00:52:25.220To be fair, they say that about everything.0.98
00:52:27.100Yeah, we could do a whole Patreon episode on that video, actually.
00:52:29.600Its fallout has been, like, absolutely insane.
00:52:31.720But it's a video that shows women at work being frivolous at work, right?0.97
00:52:35.820It doesn't show them being incompetent.
00:52:38.040It doesn't show them being morally compromised, as Hannah Horvath was.0.99
00:52:41.780It just shows them being kind of silly.0.97
00:52:43.820And it provoked this massive amount of rage as a symbol of, like, the wrongness of women's workplace access, right?0.99
00:52:51.080Right. So, like, I think the writing on girls actually seems kind of like from a more liberated gender time almost because it doesn't need to worry about that shit.0.99
00:52:59.800It is able to depict young women as undignified as a function of the security of their status and rights. Right.0.98
00:53:07.580Otherwise, it wouldn't be able to do that. It would have to be like justifying them.
00:53:10.620So, like, you can show women as kind of messy, as kind of unserious, as kind of like lacking in self-awareness or self-respect and sort of investigate those as parts of like the human experience.0.99
00:53:20.900Whereas now you couldn't do that because it would be seen not as a symbol of their humanness, but as a symbol of their femaleness and the, you know, inherent inadequacy of being a woman.0.93
00:53:30.840Right. This is also something that's interesting to me about girls is that it was kind of part of this big stylistic trend or like genre, we might even say, of like the feminist confessional, particularly on the Internet in the aughts.0.54
00:53:45.660It was this like really prevalent mode for young women writers who were millennials at the time, if you can imagine it. Millennials were once young. And, you know, that was her generation and mine. These women sort of got their start as journalists, as magazine writers, as TV writers, as like even book writers, sort of by like exposing their own indignity and self-deprecation.
00:54:12.040And at the time, this seemed, or at least was cast, as like a vaguely feminist refusal of shame, right?0.72
00:54:18.740And defiance of the notion that women had to perform decency and decorum in order to serve their place in the public sphere, right?
00:54:26.120Yeah, and it's maybe not an accident that Gia Tolentino's The Personal Essay Boom Is Over piece in The New Yorker, I think, came out pretty much as Girls was ending.
00:54:36.740And I should say that I think Gia Tolentino's understanding of that genre was that she'd edited a bunch of it at Jezebel, right?
00:54:43.600That, like, the girls' years are essentially that boom moment or that boomlet.
00:54:49.040And it is how you got published or how you started out.
00:54:53.220And a lot of the essays that Tolentino sort of skewers in that piece sound like they could be plot lines on girls, right?
00:55:01.700In the beginning, she talks about like, my gynecologist found a ball of cat hair in my vagina, which was on XO Jane.0.65
00:55:08.700Right. Like that could have easily been a season two plot point in Girls.
00:55:13.120Yeah, you know, and for those of our listeners who like maybe don't remember this moment of popular media,
00:55:19.260this was a genre of young woman's first person nonfiction that was run by a lot of like websites catering to young people.
00:55:29.500I think it's a bit rich that Gia Tolentino is, like, skewering this because, like, she was at the helm of a website that, like, was, I think, like, I think you really have to say exploiting young women writers.
00:55:40.920Like, one of many such sites that were exploiting young women writers, getting them to write things like, it happened to me, I lost my virginity to my high school teacher.0.99
00:55:49.200Or, like, it happened to me, I lost a tampon in my vagina and forgot about it for, like, a month.1.00
00:55:54.680and these were to be clear often the only bylines available to young women at the time I know
00:56:01.520because I was a young woman freelance writer then you know and I'm an old woman freelance writer now
00:56:06.260and it was basically impossible to get assigned anything that did not involve you writing in the
00:56:12.800first person about sex in a way that was like supposed to specifically invite the reader to0.99
00:56:18.440think about you having sex like you couldn't get assigned other shit if you were a young woman you0.99
00:56:22.800were not considered worthy of doing other kinds of work. And you also got paid just about nothing1.00
00:56:29.200for it. Yeah, I'm talking about like $100. The real goal was to go viral enough that you might
00:56:35.800get commissioned again. This is how a lot of writers that you and I respect right now got
00:56:40.800their start is doing this. But it was also the way a lot of young women tried writing for the
00:56:44.900first time and got horribly humiliated and pilloried in public for it. It was very,
00:56:49.940very exploitative as a content strategy and it was also very very popular right I think you can
00:56:56.100trace the rise of like auto fiction to this era too like we should do a Maggie Nelson episode who0.98
00:57:01.320I really think of as like yes the paradigmatic gen x writer for good and for ill but when women
00:57:06.680wrote this way it stuck out it was personal and it was always presumed to be very directly
00:57:12.440autobiographical even when it was fiction craft was basically never considered worthy of like
00:57:17.900discussion in any kind of discussion of these pieces you know so like the autobiographical mode0.92
00:57:24.300is taken less seriously when women do it like Ben Lerner is a fucking autofiction writer right but0.77
00:57:30.200nobody would ever compare him to Lena Dunham except for like me I guess and nobody thinks of0.94
00:57:36.320him as confessional or exhibitionist or like emotionally needy right doesn't his narrator
00:57:41.600like jerk off into a cup in 1004 I mean maybe I'm misremembering that but like that feels like it
00:57:47.020He could absolutely be on ExoJane.0.97
00:57:49.400Right, but, like, he then gets to go on, have a career as a dignified, you know, craft master and, like, quote-unquote serious novelist.0.68
00:57:56.740And the girl who wrote that ExoJane essay about the cat hair and her vagina, I guarantee does not have that luxury, right?0.90
00:58:02.540So, like, this is also the era of, like, an explosion in feminist blogging, places like Feministing, places like ExoJane, places like Jezebel.
00:58:11.720I also just recently read the Lindy West memoir, which is called Adult Races.
00:58:17.100Lindy West, a body positivity writer whose career peaked at about the same time as Dunham and whose book, Like Famesick, also deals a lot with a psychic toll of being famous in this particular kind of like millennial feminist Internet mold.
00:58:32.620and like famous is I think also like pretty conspicuously dishonest in ways that seems to
00:58:36.880sort of like clash interestingly with the ethos of confession and transparency and like refusal0.99
00:58:43.160of shame right but this is kind of like what's going on in the culture that girls emerges from
00:58:50.040right so when girls is everywhere this kind of like confessional first person like self-exposure
00:58:56.580refusal of shame young women's writing is like a genre and it's a it's a feminized genre um or
00:59:05.040maybe i mean like a feminized you know stylistic posture yeah and it was moralized as feminine it
00:59:10.360was moralized as feminine and therefore a bit frivolous a bit contaminated a little bit vulgar
00:59:16.300because the style dudum was working with was so much about revelation and about confession
00:59:22.500And because it was so much about sexuality and the body,
00:59:25.680it was also pretty inevitable, I feel like,
01:07:03.280And speaking of shame, now might be a good time to go through some of Lena Dunham's controversies.
01:07:12.720So, Adrienne, for this portion of our episode, I want you to do me a favor, and I want you to, like, pull up a Google or perhaps a more functional search engine than Google and just type in Lena Dunham apologizes.
01:17:50.140Like lots of 22-year-old, 23-year-old actresses out there, right?0.97
01:17:54.340It's touching how often her parents show up to save her bacon,
01:17:57.460But the incongruity is really kind of jarring, right? And what it got me thinking was, like, is there ever a time when fame is healthy? Is there ever a moment when there isn't this kind of sickening circularity there? And if there isn't, then, well, where does that leave us, you know?
01:18:12.580Yeah. You know, there is something about Lena where the fame is its difficulties, her inability to like sort of manage it or to like cope with this other like phantom version of herself that lives out in the public mind and in other people's heads.
01:18:29.700Yeah. Like clearly does sort of become embodied. Like it's hard. Like she doesn't really draw on this metaphor besides like the parallel processes. Right.0.55
01:18:40.220But it seems very intuitive to me that fame made her sick, right?
01:18:45.140Or this seems like the clear psychic reading, right?
01:18:48.280And she was really very ill is something that fame sick at least makes very clear, right?
01:18:55.760She's tremendously faint, like intense fatigue, tons and tons and tons of pain.
01:19:03.700The endometriosis is seemingly everywhere.
01:19:07.700is not really something she dwells on,
01:19:10.020but it's pretty clear that a lot of people around her
01:19:12.000felt that this was psychosomatic, right?