How I Quit Having a Grudge Against Lena Dunham – The Cut

Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission
Stories about the grudges we can’t get over (even if we should).

Stories about the grudges we can’t get over (even if we should).
In 2014, I published my first novel, Friendship, about two best friends whose life trajectories suddenly diverge when one of them gets accidentally pregnant and decides to keep the baby. They lived, as I did then and do now, in Brooklyn. Unfortunately for me and my book, the HBO show Girls and its creator Lena Dunham had an absolute chokehold on the cultural conversation in 2014, by which I mostly mean Twitter. Though some of the cultural conversation still did take place elsewhere, like in the New York Times, where Michiko Kakutani wrote of my book, “It doesn’t have the raw, original voice that Lena Dunham brings to HBO’s Girls, a complex series with a funny, visceral sense of the real.”It wasn’t just me. For better and worse, every cultural artifact with a whiff of autobiography about it by any youngish woman who lived in Brooklyn had to be measured against Dunham’s monolithic contribution to the genre. An indie filmmaker, Desiree Akhavan, was dubbed “the Iranian Lena Dunham,” even though if you look closely at that phrase, you can see that it makes no sense and somehow manages to insult everyone involved. It was like that for several years, and if I’m honest with myself, being compared to Girls was a hard bar to clear. Sure, my book was different, but was it better? Was it fair to compare a novel and a TV show, especially if that novel was written by someone who had actually lived in Greenpoint? Of course it wasn’t fair, but fairness wasn’t the point. That was just the way things were, and a more emotionally mature person than I was at 33 might have considered simply accepting the unfairness, moving on with her life and creative work, and also maybe being wise enough not to mention Dunham’s name to any journalists who might be interviewing her for a “Styles”-section profile. I was not that emotionally mature person.A few months before my book and its shitty reviews came out, I had been invited to a dinner party by a very nice friend who happened to live down the hall from Dunham. After the party, Dunham graciously invited us over to see her apartment, where I admired her books and shoes. When, some months later, the New York Times reporter Ruth La Ferla visited me at my day job at an app-publishing startup in the middle of a workday to interview me for a profile and asked me about Dunham, I was perfectly and idiotically candid. I described the dinner party with Dunham (why??) — which La Ferla then said she had crashed, even though she was invited — and the visit to Dunham’s apartment after. La Ferla wrote that the experience sent me into a funk, which was true — I was rabidly envious of Dunham’s nice apartment full of lovely things, and I said, as La Ferla quoted, “Every woman around my age who hopes to create something is jealous of Lena Dunham.”To Dunham’s then-writing and producing partner Jenni Konner, not to mention the kind friend who’d invited me, my loose-lipped mention of the dinner party and Dunham’s apartment was perceived as an invasion of Dunham’s privacy, and to Konner, the confession of jealousy was an insult. Konner came after me on Twitter. “It’s insane to me that the Times is comparing Emily Gould to Lena Dunham. Last time I checked, Lena writes, stars in, produces and directs …,” etc. Dunham herself DM’d me to convey her disappointment, then blocked me, the ultimate power move. I tried to go on with my life but often woke up in the middle of the night seething with bitterness. The whole situation clouded what should have been a happy time — the publication of my first novel! — and made it feel like just another in a series of professional failures. I was also fired from my job not long after, which left me with plenty of free time to Google myself and ruminate on how persecuted I was. That summer I mostly spent taking long, angry walks around Brooklyn with headphones on, chain-smoking, feeling wronged by the universe.By fall, though, I had a whole new set of preoccupations to save me from myself, thank God. I found out I was pregnant — not quite as unexpectedly as the character in my novel had been, but not entirely expectedly either — and four weeks later, dazedly participated in my own wedding day, preoccupied by the poppy-seed-size potential new life growing in my body. In the ensuing weeks, I barfed and hibernated. An old friend from my Gawker days reached out with some freelance brand-copywriting work, which prevented me from losing myself in self-absorbed worry and gloom. I felt unprepared to be a mother, but then I was one, and a new era of my life began, bringing an entirely new set of worries, preoccupations, and status insecurities along with it. Now when I was awake at 2 a.m. (and 4 a.m. and 6 a.m.), I didn’t have the energy to nurse my grudges, only the little person in the co-sleeper bassinet strapped to my bed.But I never really let go of my antipathy toward Dunham. I avoided her work, denying myself the pleasure everyone else around me found in Girls. I tried as best I could to live my life as though she didn’t exist, except when intrusive thoughts popped into my head about how I’d never be as rich, famous, successful, and well-liked as she was or when I simply couldn’t avoid a subway poster advertising her new book, or a new New Yorker essay, or a text from a good friend who worked at Lenny, Dunham’s newsletter. Okay, I was stuck in it, and for many years there seemed no way out.Then, much more recently, two important things happened. One was that I watched Industry, which I’d previously avoided because Dunham directed its pilot, and I loved it (so much!). The other was that, during a protracted manic episode, I drank so much that I worried if I stopped I’d have physical withdrawal symptoms. After I got out of the psych ward, one condition of my release was continued participation in a 12-step recovery program.On the fourth step, I wrote down a list of my resentments. In this exercise, you make four columns on a piece of paper. In the first, I wrote a long list of people, entities, and concepts. In the second, I wrote down why I resented them. In the third, I wrote what part of me had been threatened or disrupted by the thing in the first column. In the last and toughest column, I wrote down what my part was in the resentment. My list surprised me in its length and comprehensiveness — one item on it was “the state of Vermont,” for reasons too complex to detail here. But I wasn’t surprised when Dunham showed up on it too.As part of the next step, I read the list out loud to my sponsor, who responded with nonjudgmental compassion, as though resenting the state of Vermont (among other things) weren’t, on the face of it, totally bonkers. In the immediate aftermath of completing this step, I felt lighter and better, but I was far from done. For the next step, I would have to review the list and focus on that fourth column to come up with another list of my personality defects, or defaults, that I was ready for my higher power to remove. I’m a skilled and experienced procrastinator, and I put off that step for as long as I possibly could.In the interim, half my colleagues and I watched Industry season three together, delighting in every frame of the show. I thought about how I would have been denied that pleasure if I’d continued to avoid anything to do with Lena Dunham. I also read Dunham’s July 2024 interview with New Yorker writer Rachel Syme, which got into what her life is like now, some of the challenges she’s overcome, and her upcoming TV series starring the comedic genius Megan Stalter. Spending some time out of the limelight seems like it’s been great for her. “For better or worse, I’ve never been obsessed with other people’s perceptions of me, but I have always been obsessed with being able to do my thing,” she says in the interview. She also revealed that she’s been “happily sober” since 2018.When I reread my fourth-step list some months later, I found that I could cross off some of the items in column one. Vermont may have hosted one of the worst weeks of my life, but I’ve gotta give it up for ice cream and Bernie Sanders. Alongside some of the weightier, more lifelong resentments on the list, I saw the 2014 kerfluffle with Dunham and Konner in a new light. I had not, in fact, been wronged and powerless. I’d been lucky. My book got published. It got reviewed in the New York Times. Back then, I was at the outset of a career that was just beginning, that might, if I’m lucky, be still in its early stages. For that, I am profoundly grateful. Even though I’ve just rehashed the whole thing here, I gave Dunham a heads-up this time, and she was gracious and compassionate. I am now resolved never to think about 2014 again without compassion for my previous self and the previous self of everyone else involved. I have the ability now to focus on what’s most important: being able to do my thing, no matter who else’s thing it gets compared to. For that wisdom, I have Lena Dunham to thank. Even though I might still have to remember to consciously tell myself that every day — as they say in the program — the goal is progress, not perfection.Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission

Source: http://www.thecut.com/article/lena-dunham-grudge.html