About the Lena Dunham-Adjacent Think Piece
If you didn't know that Lena Dunham just published a new memoir (her second), then you probably weren't reading the New York Times last week. In the space of approximately 24 hours, the Grey Lady churned out a review, a David Marchese interview*, a think piece, and a scene report about Dunham's book launch at BAM. It was a remarkable feat, a true Human Centipede-level display of a story eating and regurgitating itself on endless loop. In a way, it depressed me: there are so, so many books out there not written by Lena Dunham that deserve this kind of coverage, if not more. The NYT's saturation speaks less to the relative merits of Dunham's book (I haven't read it and can't judge) than to the ever-shrinking number of outlets that publish book reviews and substantive criticism.
In another way, the Dunham deluge made me nostalgic. Because there are few things more evocative of the mid-2010s media than a Lena Dunham-adjacent think piece. Really, when I think about Girls, I think about all the think pieces it inspired, a veritable cottage industry of writers dissecting the show and its creator with Talmudic fervor. The hype/controversy/agita around Girls had the effect of making the show both bigger and smaller than it actually was. I watched it when it first aired and remember the experience of sitting through an episode and then having my thoughts about it derailed by whatever think piece came out the next day. So much of how I felt about Girls was filtered through the thoughts of other writers, for better or worse. When I re-watched the show years later, I was more able to appreciate it for what it was — love or hate Lena Dunham, she was mercilessly skilled at portraying the self-immolating tendencies of a certain kind of millennial white woman living in New York City.
All things considered, I think Girls is a great piece of television. But I do not, to borrow the original headline of the NYT think piece, think we need Lena Dunham more than ever. When I pinpoint the source of my nostalgia, it's not even for the Girls think pieces themselves, but the fact that there were so many places to publish them. Jezebel, the Awl, the Hairpin, the Toast: back in the mid-2010s, a corner of the internet was lousy with highly personal and opinionated writing, and a lot of it was by and about women. So if there's anything we need more than ever, it's the kind of media landscape that actually pays people to have smart opinions.
Now, of course, almost anyone can slap together a TikTok or an IG reel and hold forth. But, as the old saying goes, just because you can doesn't mean you should. When Girls was on, critics berated Dunham for (among many other things) her self-absorption and compulsion towards TMI. But those tendencies proved prophetic: for a lot of content creators, they're a pre-requisite for the job. And that brings me to something else that the Dunham deluge has made miss: if there's anything else we need more than ever, it's editors.
*I really wish they'd go back to using portraiture instead of video to accompany these interviews; the latter has the effect of rendering its subject instantly ridiculous for reasons I can't quite articulate.
What I'm consuming this week:
Reading: In the City, Joan Silber's 1987 coming-of-age novel, happily being reissued by Hagfish in May.
Watching: Margo's Got Money Troubles. The Apple TV/David E. Kelley adaptation of Rufi Thorpe's 2024 novel. Nothing will live up to the book, but as adaptations go, it's a fairly delightful one.
Listening: Ibex Band's "Stereo Instrumental Music."
