Lena Dunham has a new book out. A collection of essays
called Not That Kind of Girl describing
her charmingly rocky road to adulthood. It’s a road we’ve been down before, via
her first feature film Tiny Furniture her
hit HBO show Girls and in the odd New
Yorker article. As Alice Jones writes in her review of the book for The
Independent: “Her life is her art. Always has been. Everything that happens to
her is near instantly processed as fodder for a story.” Lots of people find
themselves fascinating. The millennial generation is full of over-privileged
naval-gazers with creative aspirations. Not That Kind Of Girl is surely far
from the only memoir of its kind. It is, however, the only one that received a
$3.7 million advance from Random House.
Part of the magic of Lena Dunham is how she refuses to spare
herself. She’s been subject to some vicious critiques – entitled, narcissistic,
not pretty enough - but they all fall flat because she’s already incorporated
them into her act. On TV, the character she plays is a walking exploration of
everything that can and has been said about the actress that plays her. She also
lets herself be filmed naked on the toilet. Not even “lets” – insists. It’s her
show, she’s the one making these choices. And it works. We are as transfixed by
her compulsive honesty as we are by her wit.
If she were a hack, I would dismiss her as a novelty. A
by-product of a generation raised on voyeurism and nurtured by (false) assurances
that they are uniquely magnificent. But she’s not a hack, she’s talented. Which
makes me excited to see where her career will go, and more than a little bit
worried as well.
I worry because I don’t know if obsessive self-examination
is enough to sustain an entire career. I do think it’s worthwhile. As they say “write
what you know” and it’s arguably impossible for a writer to write well about
any other subject until she truly understands herself. That said, I think that
early success as a memoirist can stunt the growth of a young writer. Case in
point: Elizabeth Wurtzel.
Elizabeth Wurtzel published “Prozac Nation” in 1994 when she
was 26-years old. The parallels between Wurtzel and Dunham are significant: the
New York upbringing, the frankness bordering on exhibitionism, the struggle
with mental illness. Both women, in their time, have been crowned the “voice of
a generation.” In Wurtzel’s case, it was Generation X. Her memoir about depression and
self-destructive behavior struck a chord with America’s gloomy youth when they
were reeling from the suicide of their idol Kurt Cobain. Suddenly she was
living every young writer’s dream. By her own account, she celebrated by
getting heavily into drugs and sleeping with a different man every night. Which
was her prerogative. But the trouble is, she never quite pulled off the same
trick again – of cataloguing her own experiences in a way that resonated widely
with her peers.
Fran Lebowitz has said that while experience is essential to
being a writer, some writers can only write about being young. “Once they’re no
longer young, they can’t do it anymore”. Elizabeth Wurtzel made a name for
herself writing about what it was like to be “young and depressed in America.”
She has stayed true to her self-as-subject ever since, with ever diminishing
returns. She has described the indignities of aging, the burden of being
conventionally pretty, the thrill of sleeping with married men. In January
2013, New York Magazine published her piece “Elizabeth Wurtzel Confronts her
One Night Stand of a Life,” a periphrastic whine/brag about how the writer managed
to reach her 40s without accumulating any of the conventional trappings of
adulthood. Now, at 47, she has found love at last. The world knows this now,
because of her essay in this Sunday’s New York Times entitled “Getting Married
Is Easy” where she announces her engagement by describing what a disaster her
dating life was for decades before meeting her now-fiance. Wurtzel is still
dealing with themes that people can emotionally connect with, but it’s almost
irrelevant because she has so thoroughly cordoned herself off from any audience
she may still have.
Swimming against the tide of social expectation isn’t easy.
It’s understandable that twenty years of it has given Wurtzel a “me against the
world” mentality. But I think her writing suffers from it. When she briefly turns
her focus towards the people around her, she tends to make sweeping
generalizations that don’t always ring true. Observations along the lines of “everyone
else is doing this” or “most people feel this way” are seldom substantiated,
and it often feels like she’s only interested in the general population insofar
as it proves how removed she is from it. A harsh critic of her times, she
revels in her status as outcast. Because if society is so debased, then there
is a kind of purity in failing to conform, right? “In a world gone wrong, a
pure heart is dangerous” she writes with zero irony. The reader is then
antagonized by default. You may feel like an outcast, or a failure, or a “difficult
personality” but you’re not Elizabeth Wurtzel. Therefore, you can’t relate to
what she’s going through. You can only stupidly think that you do.
It’s a shame really, because she’s not a hack either. She’s
probably almost as smart as she thinks she is, which is impressive. But she
crossed a threshold somewhere. Self-scrutiny is a window into the outside world.
But taken too far it can also become a dark, locked room.
I don’t believe that Wurtzel is the Ghost of Lena Dunham
future. For some reason, I see the latter staying grounded and adaptable where
her predecessor spiraled off into self-aggrandized oblivion. Why would that be?
An article on the blog The Pessimist called “Ugly: The
Problem with Elizabeth Wurtzel” suggests that the memoirist’s career was doomed
by her, well, hotness. This may be partly true, but only because she insisted
on making such a big damn deal about it. It’s hard to be on board with anyone
who waxes poetic about their own beauty. Conversely, Lena Dunham has probably
benefitted from the accessibility of her looks. She’s extremely cute, she’s got
a rock star boyfriend, and she’s been on the cover of Vogue. But in the
Twilight Zone of Hollywood, she does stand out for looking a bit more like the
rest of us. Her arrival on the scene was heralded as “refreshing” and “real”
which helped fuel her meteoric rise. Will it help her career in the long run, in
the same way that being moviestar gorgeous hurt Wurtzel? Maybe. But I think
that Dunham’s salvation will be more a matter of intellect than looks.
I was introduced to Dunham (like many people) through Tiny Furniture. That movie was the story
of her fictionalized self, but the other characters were fully realized as well.
The same applies to her costars on Girls.
I think that her talent is strongest in her dialogue, which bodes well. Because
writing dialogue forces you to step out of your own perspective and inhabit
someone else’s. You don’t have the option of relating to the whole world as a
monolithic foe (the way Wurtzel so often does) when you’re writing a screenplay.
So the fact that Dunham has such a knack for that particular art form gives me
hope that her work will continue to resonate even when she and her cohort are
no longer young.
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