Lena Dunham: 'I just want to work the death thing out' extract
Lena Dunham's first book, like Dunham herself, has accrued a cultural significance that is much greater than the sum of the parts. The daughter of two New York artists, she has been the focus of US media attention since she was a child, to a degree that most people would find bewildering though she, according to her memoir, took a dissociative pleasure in it. When she was 11, she was interviewed by US Vogue about her thoughts on fashion: "I find Calvin Klein really hard to respect because he's everywhere. I view him as a clothesmonger," the 11-year-old mused. When she was 16, the New York Times, for no obvious reason, covered a "vegan feast" she threw for her friends where shoes were banned: "I just thought it was sort of bohemian-seeming," the teenager explained.
Ever since it was announced that, on the back of her debut film, Tiny Furniture, she would be directing, writing and starring in the HBO series Girls, Dunham has been dubbed by the media as the "voice of her generation" "or at least, a voice," her character Hannah amusingly slurs to her parents while intoxicated in the pilot episode of Girls. Dunham's fans and detractors have, ever since, lionised and demonised the twentysomething to the point that she now represents whatever the hell you want: the blogging generation! Feminism! Misogyny! Just stick a reference to Dunham into your zeitgeisty feature and the youth-obsessed media will clamour to publish it.
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