I read Lena Dunham’s book Not That Kind of Girl and I liked it. I’ve gotta say it. She’s been
getting a lot of press, some of it accusing her of being weirdly interconnected with, and possibly abusive of, her younger sister. I gotta say I enjoyed the book. She’s funny. She’s young, sure.Painfully so, when I consider that she could be my child. Or rather,
that I could have a child her age. Ouch. But she has some self-awareness,
thanks to mucho therapy. You know how I feel about therapy. NO? Well, nevermind.
I might turn you off by saying more.
 |
| How I feel about keeping Lena's book out so long. |
Anyway, my point. Despite all the negative press she has
received, mostly from conservatives, I don’t think she wrote anything
particularly disturbing about her relationship with her sister. Yes, she did
look in her sister’s vagina, when her sister was a toddler and she was six
years older than that. But it was because her sister had inserted marbles in
there. I would have looked, too. And then she told their mother, and then her
mother got to remove them. Ah, the joys of parenthood. Just the other day I was
wondering WHEN my children might learn to throw up in the toilet. TMI? Sorry.
Anyway, yes, she shared a bed with her sister, and seems to
have tried to lavish her with love as if her sister were her baby. This behavior
is so classic I don’t even need a psych degree to analyze it. Let’s just say I
was more direct in expressing my jealousy. I simply tried to kill my sister
(six and a half years younger, like Lena’s younger sister) by holding her nose.
When I let go, her nostrils stuck together briefly, and I panicked.
I like to think this is one of the reasons my sister grew up
to be the excellent psychotherapist and psychoanalyst she is.
People’s reactions to Lena Dunham and her book reminded me
of an incident regarding Harriet the Spy.
The younger daughter and I read it for our mother-daughter book club. Thing is,
as a kid, I loved Harriet the Spy. I
related to Harriet. I was a writer. We had a housekeeper (a series of them,
actually) with whom I had relationships. I even made a spy route around my
neighborhood and wrote about it in a notebook. I knew what a dumbwaiter was
because my nursery school was in an old mansion that had one. But when the
younger generation read the book they couldn’t relate to Harriet. They thought
she was spoiled and super rich. Yet I and my schoolmates and neighborhood
friends all lived the same way. Many or most of us had housekeepers and working
parents and went to private schools. It wasn’t so hard to achieve that standard
of living back then.
Which is, I guess, why so many people feel that Lena Dunham
is hopelessly privileged. By the standards of these times, she is. Most of the
children I know do not have regular housekeepers or nannies. That style of
living is out of reach for most people now. This seems like a tangible
expression of those stagnant wages and real earnings I’ve heard so much about
on the news. You know the stuff about how since the 1970s, people’s incomes
haven’t actually kept pace with price increases and other economic stuff I know
nothing about. But I do know about therapy and private schools and how my kids
don’t get those things – but I did.
So I liked her honesty and her tone and her self-deprecating
humor. And I guess I just don’t find her upbringing threatening.
In short, I related to Lena. How could I not, when she
writes things like, “The germophobia morphs into hypochondria morphs into
sexual anxiety morphs into the pain and angst…?” Sure, she was talking about
middle school. I have never been that extreme. Although, come to think of it,
in 7th grade I fell under the spell of that saying, “See a pin, pick
it up, all the day you’ll have good luck. See a pin, let it lay, [something one
syllable I can’t remember or never knew] bad luck is here to stay.” This meant
that I had to pick up every safety pin I saw. Readers, there were so many of
them. I hung each new find on a big pin I’d come across, sort of like
safety-pin art, and I’d have to carry this set of pins with me. Eventually, I
was pinning that bunch of safety pins to my underwear for protection every day.
I think this stopped only when my stepmother asked with irritation why all my
underpants had holes at the waistband and fear knocked some sense into me. I
realized I couldn’t indulge this kind of obsessive behavior. I moved on to
something more normal, picking my split ends.
Confession time.* I had this post about Lena Dunham almost ready a while
ago. Back in ’14, I believe. But I didn’t get a chance to finish it. I think
I had too much procrastinating to do. Then the book was due at the library.
I love the library. And I couldn’t renew it because there is a waiting list for
it. But I couldn’t return it because I had to look up a couple things to quote
for you, Readers. Then it was Christmas and everything got “tidied up” around
the house. This is shorthand for saying I lost it. But then I found it again,
after New Year’s, and I returned the book. I promise I did.
How do you feel about overdue library books? I used to worry
about them. I tried never to have overdue books. However, unlike my MIL, who has never returned a book late to the
library, I have become a compulsive late returner. Worse, instead of
feeling bad about this, I feel okay, because I know I’m performing a service to
the library. They count on those overdue fees to contribute to their budget
items. So, it’s actually a good deed, a veritable mitzvah, to return them late.
As long as you pay those fines.
So what did I want to quote? Well, I intended to illustrate
my statement that the book is funny and well–written. That Dunham, while young,
is reasonably self-aware, thanks to a lot of therapy, about which she writes at
length. She’s aware of how people view her – as a privileged, white, New
Yorker. At the same time, she’s only in her late twenties, so she’s still got
limited awareness of herself and a limited scope of interest. But she puts it
out on the page well. For example, on page 46, she recounts a moment at college
(Oberlin), where someone points out her sheltered upbringing by calling her
“Little Lena from Soho.”
“What
a snarky jerk,” she writes. “(Obviously I later slept with him.)”
Come
on, that’s funny.
If
I could put myself out there on the page and be honest and raw and funny and
insightful and get PUBLISHED and PAID to do so, I’d feel successful. Oh, yeah.
*Rereading this, to implement the fixes the husband pointed out were needed, this strikes me as hilarious, following as it does the paragraph about my 7th grade OCD. Not to mention the attempted suffocation of my sister. Like that wasn't a confession??
