On being a woman, writing in the age of the internet, and making friends on Twitter.
Three days before the release of her first book, Not That Kind of Girl, Lena Dunham sat down with her friend, BuzzFeed News staff writer Ashley C. Ford, to discuss confession as currency, the undervalued beauty of memoir, and what might be the most unlikely friendship to develop over Twitter.
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Ashley Ford: Hi Lena! Let's just get into it, OK? OK. So, I was reading an article in Vulture and there's this new show Transparent with Jeffrey Tambor—
Lena Dunham: I saw the pilot, it's beautiful!
AF: I haven't seen it yet, but I keep hearing fantastic things.
LD: It's awesome! My friend, Gaby [Hoffman], who was on Girls is in it. She's one of my oldest friends. I've known her since we were 3.
AF: She was also in Obvious Child!
LD: Yes she was, and she was also in the first movie Nora Ephron ever directed, so it all comes full circle. She's amazing. She was a child actor, a really great one, who has now transitioned into being a really great adult actor.
AF: Indeed she has. Anyway, in this Vulture article, the creator of Transparent, Jill Soloway, said something to the effect that you and your writing in Girls was one of the things that gave her permission or inspired her to stop pretending. She said she has been writing for a long time wanting to write characters like yours but hiding them behind likability. After knowing you and reading things that other people have said about you, one of the things I thought was, Has Lena ever been good at pretending?'
LD: Firstly, that's such a nice compliment from Jill! I love her work and she seems like she's always been bravely working on shows like Six Feet Under that really pioneered for me the ability to talk through characters who weren't necessarily behaving perfectly or sympathetically, but who I still cared about. That being said, no, I am the worst pretender in the world. If I'm having an issue with someone, I can't even wait 45 minutes until we can get to a private place to talk to someone.
I think half of my life has been trying to turn my inability to fake it, and my inability to separate myself from whatever emotion I'm feeling at the time into a viable way of life. I was once having a fight with my boyfriend, a typical couple fight, and we were at Mother's Day with his mom and his grandmother. And I was like, "We need to go outside and talk about this right now." And he was like, "Lena, we are going to be 30 years old. You need to be able to stand in Mother's Day for half an hour and know we're going to talk about it in the car." And I was like, "I can't! I can't stand here faking it." I have none of those skills. Can you pretend?
AF: I'm not good at pretending, but I am good at being manipulative in a similar way. I give people seemingly intimate information about myself, that satisfies them, and makes them feel close to me. I want people to feel close to me even if I'm actually too scared to let them in.
LD: I think it's really true that people — especially in this day and age — use sharing as capital in a way to say to other people, "Trust me." In some ways, I share for a living. I've definitely had to reexamine what sharing means to me. There are things I will only share with a true friend. There are parts of my life you know about that aren't in the book and aren't in my show.
AF: I do it because I really hate the idea of anybody feeling uncomfortable around me, or feeling like they can't talk to me about something. Part of it is an offering so people can know I'm a safe person.
LD: That's such a beautiful way of thinking about it.
AF: It's not super important for me to know people's deepest darkest secrets, I'm not a secret-hoarder, but I don't want people to feel like they can't tell me their secrets.
LD: You want people to feel safe and settled around you, and it helps you feel safe and settled if everybody else does too. That makes sense to me.
AF: When do you feel safe and settled?
LD: I feel safe and settled in a one-on-one context like this, drinking tea with a friend. In this case with you, even while the tape recorder is on. I feel safe and settled in my home reading a book, walking down the street to get a yogurt, or at work when I feel really clear on what we're doing that day. I've always loved a one-on-one conversation, or a constructive work environment, or a nap. Those are my three safest areas. What are yours?
AF: I feel really safe when I'm by myself, listening to music, and reading all at the same time. I'm recently finding that sharing my space when that's happening is really intimate for me. My favorite moments between me and my boyfriend are just that, him putting on a record, and us both reading. He'll be on the couch, and I'll be in a chair, and I don't know that I love him more in any other time than I do in those moments.
LD: The time when I read before bed, or the time I can steal in the afternoon, is increasingly the most sacred time of my day. Especially with the book coming out and all the anxiety I've had about that moment, I can't get enough of that time when it's just me and a book, or that article that I've been waiting to read. That intimate time is when I just pull myself back together. My boyfriend is not much of a reader. He can appreciate good writing, but for him, it's not the same kind of rebirth and rejuvenation that it is for me. He's had to really learn what reading means to me. It's an amazing thing to have had the same escape from the time you're 3 years old to the time you're 30 years old.
AF: When you say "stitching yourself back together," do you feel like you lose pieces of yourself in the sharing process?
LD: As you know, with memoir or personal essays or autobiographical work, there's always this dance of figuring out what you can share without hurting yourself or the people around you, and when you get that balance right, it's the most cathartic thing in the world. To share enough, but to have still kept a little for yourself, nothing feels better.
When I need that stitch myself back together feeling most is during the promotion of something. You become this kind of weird hologram of yourself, because you're engaging with the press juggernaut, and you can't control it. If you're a creative controlling person you still try to. I have been on set for 22 hours and I'm fine. I'm tired, but I'm tired in this really strong way. But if I've done eight hours of press, I'm so tired I can't speak English to you. I don't even know what my name is. I did a bunch of press this week, then I went to my parents' house to stay with them, and I slept for 14 hours. That's what my body needed. It's such a weird thing to spend that amount of time a) talking about yourself and b) monitoring yourself.
AF: This is funny to me because my friend Roxane [Gay] has been on two book tours this year.
LD: I can't even believe what Roxane has been up to. Plus, being a professor? The girl is on fire.
AF: She really is! But, she one day tweeted, "I'm so sick of myself." Which was about talking about herself in interviews.
LD: I think if you don't have her reaction, you're a maniac. If you're content to talk about yourself that much, you have a serious broken element inside yourself. Or maybe that's not fair, maybe you just have a routine down and you're good at it. But I know exactly how she feels. There are times when the sound of my voice makes me want to hurl myself off a large structure. Plus, you already spend so much time trapped with your voice when you're writing a memoir. Do you ever have that feeling?
AF: That's when I know I need to take a break or walk away. I feel like once I start reading back to myself and every thought I have in reaction to the writing is Who the fuck cares? I know I've reached my limit.
LD: Do you feel like it helps you that you can move back and forth between memoir and more journalistic writing for BuzzFeed?
AF: Absolutely. I am exhausting. I'm not sure how anybody who spends a lot of time with me, deals with me. I'm moody, not extremely, just in a slightly annoying way. I exhaust myself.
LD: I find you to be a pleasure, but usually I get to have dinner or tea with you, so maybe your moodiness takes place elsewhere. But you know, you and I once spent a very intimate weekend together — I hope people take that sexually — and I feel like I would have been exposed to your moods. But even just what it feels like to be in your own head.
The next film projects I'm working on have a more historical bent and they're about topics I'm interested in. That being said, just to be able to move my attention to a time and place that isn't my own has been thrilling. I know you've found this as you work on your memoir, something that is such an exhaustive accounting of where you've been and what you've been through, even if it isn't the whole story, it takes something out of you.
AF: It does. And my mother likes to remind me often that it can take from other people too. The day I moved to New York, my mom called me because she read an essay and didn't like what I wrote. She said, "You have to understand that when you write things about your life, it's not just about you." And I said, "Sure." But I feel like it is about me. She's part of my life, obviously, but she's not the entire story of my life.
LD: I tried to be careful to show the material to the people who I wrote about. With the exception of the times I thought it would be bad for my safety or my emotional health. That was only like two people in the book. Two or three people in the book. OK, four. All men. I'm not of the belief that you necessarily need to break a few eggs to make an omelet. I did not want anyone in my life to feel abused by this book. The fact that something's true doesn't always make it OK for someone to hear it. So, I showed the book to my family and most of my friends.
AF: Do you feel that when you hit something important it's also something that has almost completely laid you bare? Did you have moments like that while writing your book?
LD: Yes. I had a few essays in the book that I thought about not publishing. It sounds like a trite writer's statement, (she switches to a distinct snobby voice) "I was afraid to publish a few of these pieces." And we're like, "Fuck you, no you weren't.'" But I truly was. I felt like why, as a person who already has a semi-public life, would I want to put more of this stuff into the universe? And I realized that I only write what I feel like I have to. Do you feel that way?
AF: Specifically with nonfiction, yes. I've told people before that I try to write to fill cracks. Whenever I feel like there's something on this side, there's something on the opposite side, and there's a chasm between them; if I have experiences that fill that chasm that could hopefully help these two sides see each other a little better, or if it helps me reconcile both of those sides of myself, then I write. My book is basically about loving fiercely, and in a very complicated way, someone who's done something monstrous. There are parts of that person that are good, and parts of that person that are borderline monstrous. I had to give myself permission to feel how I felt, so I could figure out what those feelings said or didn't say about who I am.
LD: Well, that's the reason I was initially so attracted to your writing. I was at a place in writing my book where I really needed to see someone telling the truth in a way that I could tell was challenging them, but they were doing it anyway. I think I found your writing — not to overstate it, but I kind of can't overstate it — I found your writing at a point where I really needed to. I met your work, and then met you, at a point when I really needed to see somebody else telling a story that they kind of couldn't take back. The couple of essays that I mention in the book that are about the challenges of gray areas of being abused in some way, those are pieces that wouldn't be in the world if it weren't for you.
AF: Shut up.
LD: It's real! I remember you and I were emailing, and my parents were like, "What are you doing for four hours over there, hunched over your iPhone at the airport?" And I was like, "I'm emailing Ashley, and this is what I need to do right now to feel like I can be alive and continue my work on this book!" It pushed me through as I thought about how to form this. It's really amazing to be talking to you about it at this point when you're headed off to work on your book for a month. It feels very synchronous.
AF: I tell people often that mine and yours is the most improbable friendship and relationship of my life. I don't think people in general would think that being friends with Lena Dunham means feeling very well taken care of spiritually and emotionally.
LD: They think you're friends with that asshole who does those assholes things on TV.
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