Lena, I have always loved you

I always liked Girls. I remember watching the early seasons while I was a student at Manchester. The lives of the characters (all living in New York in their own apartments with allowances and so on) seemed impossibly glamorous to me then. They had so much freedom.

Although looking back at that time in my own life now, I remember it, too, as an endless stream of house parties and late nights and strange crushes. So much freedom. What did I do during the day? I went to the library. I sometimes took the bus to catering shifts at strange regional weddings. Otherwise I sort of went about the place. My best friend Rachel worked for Harvey Nichols and she had an apartment in town and we would have cocktails there or make Vietnamese food. We went to parties in abandoned buildings. I remember we were at a gig one night. This boy came up to us outside and said he’d come to Manchester to “find the scene” as he put it. He asked us to help him find it. We told him we had no idea what he meant. It seemed such a strange question to me. It still does.

Anyway. How glamorous! That’s how I see it all now. Maybe you never really appreciate your own life while you’re living it.

So with Girls I liked to watch it for the glamour, and for New York. All of the buildings. That was the problem with the new Gossip Girl, apart from that it was obsessed with boring and fake privilege checking. They were all inside too much. It wasn’t exciting to watch.

But there was so much truth underneath Girls too. I remember watching certain episodes, the one where Marni meets Charlie again in the park, for example, and they go in the boat at night. I was amazed at the truth underneath it. It felt somehow like something which had happened to me. The bald facts of it never had. But something underneath it, I had experienced.

The conversations at the time I remember being about this quality of Girls. This sense that there was something which felt real, about certain characters, about certain situations. Even recently, I was about at something, and someone came up to tell me they liked a story I read at a reading a little while ago. Then they said: “But this other person was like when Marni did the karaoke.” I immediately knew exactly what they meant. Almost 15 years later people still refer to these moments! That scene still feels like the best incarnation of something we all recognise from our own lives.

I remember other conversations too. So many conversations about Lena Dunham’s body. I remember men I knew at that time (not friends then and not friends now) would talk about how unseemly it was that she was naked on the TV. Which, if you go back and look at those old pictures of her back then, feels like a startling declaration to make.

I remember the frenzied pitch of the rest of the discourse. I remember conversations about how she wasn’t actually bad looking enough (?) for someone who was supposed to be bad looking. How was she supposed to look, exactly? There was always this sense with Lena Dunham’s looks, that her appearance was some kind of performance piece, instead of simply a human existing in their own body. I remember discourse about her privilege, how clueless she was, how un-selfaware. She wrote this annoying character and that was her personality. The fact she had written a large quantity of every character on the show, including all of the male characters, seemed to escape some people at the time. Actually it seemed to escape quite a few people.