Megan Pryce, Lena Dunham, 2014
(March 9) I found myself really liking this book… but it was strange… it didn’t make me heh-heh like Tina Fey would; it didn’t make me laugh like Miranda July, Nora Ephron or Mindy Kaling would… but I thought about it when I wasn’t reading it.Sometimes I just thought, bah, this entitled girl of the new millennium -- she just has the same problems as every girl in history has ever had and the same self-fixation …. her problems are just a little more pathetic than usual… which she is somehow “fixing” or “rationalizing” or “moving on” from by being ironic???? I’m not sure; "kids today!"
I mean, I wouldn’t want people to know that men had treated me the way some men have treated Lena Dunham…. but I can’t think why it helps anything to keep such things private, either.
Though she and every new young thing in the world (cf. Holden Caulfield) like to be blasé about everything, they are shocked by the same things that shock all of us, and they like to haul them out and give everyone a good blast of trauma every once in a while. (I was going to say “old people don’t do this” but then thought of Jerry Saltz.)
Mostly, though, it’s that every once in a while Dunham, whose problems we all share and are so banal, is very profoundly insightful…. e.g., about her body and that tiny man’s body… about feminism… “it would be easy to just be a jerk like a man but what a great honour it is to have to try to behave like a woman.”
The wisdom of her mother was compelling: “you don’t gain respect by….”
Dunham made me think about a lot of things, and especially a lot about feminism… I feel like I haven’t been feminist enough now ...and I was never shy about it.
If I ever had the chance to ask her a question about the book, though, it would be about whether Pepper, the little hamster whose fused hind legs were snipped apart with manicure scissors by Nathan the pervert teacher, went on to have a normal hamster life.
A hamster is a huge part of Tiny Furniture, come to think of it.
