Titles written by women have dominated the bestseller list this summer, and this week we look at Lena’s Dunham’s memoir, Famesick. To me, what many of these books have in common (including “Yesteryear” by Caro Claire Burke, and “Strangers,” by Belle Burden) is an examination of the caustic effects of gender roles and feminine ideals and expectations for women, and what they extract.
Each of these books is a story about a woman, in one way or another, trying to survive and keep her head above water in a culture that holds women to impossible expectations while extracting their labor and worth. Each of these women is valued or discarded according to their ability to perform work for others while sublimating their own needs—all while being held to impossible standards of femininity that make them never quite feel loved or cherished, but constantly earning a place in others’ lives.
Dunham’s accounting of this phenomenon is perhaps one of the most raw and profound versions that we have had.
Lena Dunham means something to each of us—something different depending on age, whether and how much we watched Girls, proximity to Brooklyn (geographically or aspirationally), or how much time we spent on Twitter, Gawker, and People magazine in the mid-2000’s.
When I started teaching college students in New York City ten years ago, many of my students wrote about Dunham, and mainly how much they hated her. (I assigned some essays from Dunham’s first book of personal essays, which is outstanding and cemented her as a real literary force.) My students resented that she was supposedly “the voice of their generation,” (a claim that Dunham never made but stuck to her—it’s actually a comedic line that her character Hannah delivers in the Girls pilot episode.)
And, I think now in retrospect, they resented Dunham because they felt the way she was analyzed and torn apart for her every perceived misstep and embarrassment made them look bad in a way. It reminded the young women in my classes that any young woman succeeding anywhere can be picked apart and made a laughing stock—proof that young women are embarrassing, undeserving, and can’t do anything right.
Now, it’s fascinating to watch the young women in my uni classes fall in love with Lena Dunham. It’s like she’s some un-earthed life force that they didn’t know they needed. They mainline Girls, they create long video essay homages to her work, her genius and vulnerability, her essential cultural contributions.
It’s a lovely turnaround, but it is also reminiscent of the tragedy of Brittney, Lindsay Lohan, Monica Lewinsky, Janet Jackson, and so many other women who are subject to predatory public scrutiny and hatred, to eventually be met with re-examination and empathy after life-long personal and cultural damage have been done.
Dunham’s story raises so many questions and has so many (to me, surprisingly) relatable moments. Here are a few questions to get us started; feel free to add your own in the comments threads:
Why do you think it is that Dunham’s early success drew so much derision to her—while her male counterparts (The Safdie brothers, Adam Driver, Jack Antonoff, for example), seemed to skate by relatively unscathed?
I was struck by Dunham’s health struggles which are extraordinary, but also feel oddly familiar in that women so often are expected to perform for everyone around them with little or no care. Why is it that female bodies receive so little care, and why are we so impatient, dismissive, or even repulsed by a female body that is sick or in pain?
What did you think about Dunham’s intimate relationships in the book, and how she treats them—Jenni, Jack, Nora, and each of her romantic or sexual trysts? Was she fair with them, or give them more than they deserve? What do you imagine their side of the story might look like?
What do you think of Lena’s relationship with her family and the role that they play in her life and recovery? What questions did it raise for you in terms of what parents owe their children, and vice-versa. (Full disclosure, I’m obsessed with Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham!)
What else? Let’s get into it in the comments.
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