by Lena Dunham
My most frequently recurring dream is one in which I suddenly remember I have a number of pets living in my home that I haven’t tended to in years. Rabbits, hamsters, iguanas, stacked in dirty cages in my closet or beneath the bed. Terrified, I open the door, and the light touches them for the first time in ages. Desperate, I dig through the clumped, wet wood chips. I’m afraid they’re decomposing in there, but I find them still alive, thin and milky eyed and filthy. I know that I loved them once, that they had a better life before I got so distracted with work and myself and let them shrivel up and nearly die. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” I tell them as I clean their cages and fill their bottles with fresh water. “How can I make it up to you?”
You wrote me a beautiful letter,—I wonder if you meant it to be as beautiful as it was.—I think you did; for somehow I know that your feeling for me, however slight it is, is of the nature of love.…When you tell me to come, I will come, by the next train, just as I am.
—Letter from EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY to EDITH WYNNE MATTHISON
I’VE HAD EXACTLY ONE serious girl crush, a term I have been taught to hate by women I admire (but do not, in fact, have girl crushes on). Also, being in possession of a gay sister, I find the term “girl crush” slightly homophobic, as if I need to make it clear that my crush on another woman is not at all sexual but, rather, mild and adorable, much like … a girl.
My crush’s name was An Chu. I was in third grade, she in fourth. She wore thermal t-shirts, wide-leg jeans, and a headband on her hairline, creating the impression that it was holding on a glossy black wig.
She was, in hindsight, maybe gay—into kickball, the kind of swagger that isn’t designed to arouse guys but does anyway during the preboner years when a girl being able to horse around is a bigger sexual stimulant than boobs. A laser-sharp focus on her select group of girlfriends. An was gorgeous like a lady but unknowable like a man. She was active but quiet. Her smile was slow, and her head was too big for her body, and when I looked at her I felt uncomfortably warm.
We never spoke, but I watched her closely on an overnight class trip to a nature retreat, gazed as she shook a rain stick and analyzed an owl pellet, and after my parents picked me up early (I had barfed), I spent the next weekend in the guest room at my grandma’s house imagining An and me sharing secrets in the dim orange light of a sleepover.
I haven’t had a crush on a woman since, unless you count my confusing relationship with Shane from The L Word. I’ve never wanted to be with women so much as I wanted to be them: there are women whose career arc excites me, whose ease of expression is impressive, whose mastery of party banter has me simultaneously hostile and rapt. I’m not jealous in traditional ways—of boyfriends or babies or bank accounts—but I do covet other women’s styles of being.
There are two types of women in particular who inspire my envy. The first is an ebullient one, happily engaged from morning until night, able to enjoy things like group lunches, spontaneous vacations to Cartagena with gangs of girlfriends, and planning other people’s baby showers. The bigger existential questions don’t seem to plague her, and she can clean her stove without ever once thinking, What’s the point? It just gets dirty again anyway and then we die. Why don’t I just stick my head…
My grandma Dottie is this kind of woman. At ninety-five, she still gets her hair done twice weekly, is always armed with a tube of coral lipstick, and offers advice for the lovelorn (“You have to be positive and just talk with your eyes”). She’s been teeny tiny her entire life, and once, at a military dance in the late ’30s, a soldier told her, “I could eat peanuts off your head,” which she took as a massive compliment.
The modern version of this is my friend Deb, who loves trying new exercise classes and is able to write for the same four hours every day in the same coffee shop, unconflicted about the creative process. She had a revolving door of casual dinner dates when she was single, before she met her husband and fell in love with him, never once accusing him of not understanding “what it feels like to be me.” Deb plans regular weekend getaways to “sexy, delightful” places like Palm Springs and Tulum and is a master at the logistics of dinner parties and doctor’s visits. She doesn’t seem to worry that she has lupus or cancer. It would be easy for me to jealously dismiss Deb as flighty or superficial, unaware of what’s really going on in the world. But Deb’s smart and, I told you, I am jealous.
The other type of woman that gets me crazy with envy is the beautiful depressive. I know it’s not good to glamorize depression, but I am speaking here of a more low-grade melancholy that would be a massive bummer in your supermarket checkout guy but works pretty well for a certain kind of long-limbed, lank-haired aspiring actress-poet. One Sunday I was walking around Brooklyn, looking for rice pudding, when I ran into the girlfriend of a close male friend of mine. She was jogging, milky legs extending for miles from her retro track shorts.
“How are you doing, Leanne?” I asked.
She looked at me all sleepy eyed and, with a Victorian sigh, said: “Shitty.” I was so impressed! Who answers that question honestly? Let’s say I was on my way to buy a gun with which to kill myself and I ran into a casual acquaintance who works in PR for H&M:
CASUAL ACQUAINTANCE: Hey, what’s up?
LENA: Oh, not much. Just going to buy something weird. [Giggles.]
CASUAL ACQUAINTANCE: Long time, no see. How ya been?
LENA: Oh, ya know. Así así! Life is such a WEIRD thing, ya know? It’s like OFF THE WALL! I mean, we should get coffee sometime. I’m literally free anytime.
As I watched Leanne slo-mo jog home, I thought of how effective that routine must be. Leanne is so beautiful and sad. Her boyfriend will spend years going on midnight errands for her, just trying to make her smile. I used to think guys liked it when you’re cheerful, adaptable, and quippy. In fact, pouting in front of a Nature Channel show and forcing them to wonder what you’re thinking after sex is, in most cases, far more effective.
I have been envious of male characteristics, if not the men themselves. I’m jealous of the ease with which they seem to inhabit their professional pursuits: the lack of apologizing, of bending over backward to make sure the people around them are comfortable with what they’re trying to do. The fact that they are so often free of the people-pleasing instincts I have considered to be a curse of my female existence. I have watched men order at dinner, ask for shitty wine and extra bread with a confidence I could never muster, and thought, What a treat that must be. But I also consider being female such a unique gift, such a sacred joy, in ways that run so deep I can’t articulate them. It’s a special kind of privilege to be born into the body you wanted, to embrace the essence of your gender even as you recognize what you are up against. Even as you seek to redefine it.
I know that when I am dying, looking back, it will be women that I regret having argued with, women I sought to impress, to understand, was tortured by. Women I wish to see again, to see them smile and laugh and say, It was all as it should have been.
In eighth grade, my class took a field trip to Washington, D.C. This is a tradition for eighth grades around the country, the premise being that you will see the monuments, learn about the various branches of government, and enjoy some well-deserved time at Johnny Rockets. The reality is that the day is just a way to get to the night, when the curtains are pulled back to reveal a circus of debauchery that every chaperone wisely chooses to “sleep” through. Students run from room to room of some airport Marriott, their wildest selves unleashed, screaming to be heard over the TVs and rap music and running showers with nobody in them. Sometimes there’s booze in a shampoo bottle; sometimes people kiss in a bathroom.
It was on the second night of the trip, as we watched a Drew Barrymore movie on basic cable, that every girl in my suite—Jessica, Maggie, even Stephanie, who had a SERIOUS BOYFRIEND—decided to go totally gay. It started with some light kissing on the bed, then Jessica was topless and shaking her tits, clutching her own nipples and wag
gling them mercilessly in our faces.
I was a shelter dog, frozen with fear. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to join in. I sort of did. But what if I liked it? What if I started and I never stopped? How could I turn back? I had no issue with gay people. I just didn’t want to be one. I was fourteen. I didn’t want to be anything yet. I curled up and, like our math teacher in the room next door, pretended to sleep.
I’d heard about Nellie—a prodigious British playwright whose Wikipedia page said she was two months younger than I. An actor I know had performed in Nellie’s only New York production and described her as Tinker Bell or Annabel Lee—or Pattie Boyd right around when she was really fucking shit up for George Harrison. An intellectual with a penchant for deep emotional connection, drunken dancing, vintage coats slung over one shoulder.
Pictures of Nellie on the Internet revealed a pale waif with a mess of bleached hair and an outfit like a modern Joan of Arc, all pale rags and androgynous angles.
A Google search of Nellie’s name was unsatisfying. She didn’t have Twitter, a blog, or any other form of personal Internet expression. A scant web presence is so rare these days, alluring in and of itself. She was telling her story through the ancient medium of theater.
Months into my Google gumshoe work on Nellie, she appeared at a talk I was doing at the New Yorker festival. It was a hard crowd to make giggle, and they were full of self-serious questions about race and sexual politics that I answered unsteadily, tired and underprepared. Afterward I met Nellie in the green room and shook her frail hand and was surprised by how deep her voice was, like an old British man’s. Her eyes were half closed, her collar buttoned up as high as it could go. She looked like Keats or Edie Sedgwick or some other important dead artist.
“I’m such a big fan of yours,” I told her, having only ever Google-image-searched her. I had never read a word of her work, but, looking into her heart-shaped face, I wanted nothing more than to make a lasting impression. Hi, I’m Lena, I wanted her to feel, and I like theater and stoops and parties where people cry.
“Thank you, thank you,” she purred.
When I was fifteen my friend Sofia taught me her favorite trick, one that she said drove the boys crazy. She presented it like it was a complex act that required expert instruction, but really it was just sucking someone’s earlobe. She was ahead of me in the sex game, and I tried hard to act like this was something I’d gotten up to before.
It was late, and I could hear my parents’ dinner party winding down, people gathering their coats, my father prematurely washing the dishes, his way of signaling that the night was over.
Sofia was explaining to me how stupid boys are, how a few tricks could bring them to their knees in a matter of seconds. She was wearing a tight white t-shirt and stonewashed jeans that cut into the meat of her waist. She had the kind of glossy hair that was always slipping out of its ponytail and permanently reddened skin.
She demonstrated on me, on the mattress in my “office”—actually a crawl space off my bedroom where we kept crafting supplies and the litter box. I could feel the tips of her teeth and then my pulse in my vagina.
I am going to London. All alone. I haven’t been to London since age fourteen, when I was angry my mother forced me to ride a Ferris wheel and even angrier because I liked it.
Unsure of how to use this time, I decide to email Nellie, whose work I have now read and found as impressive and impenetrable as her person.
When Nellie replies, she calls me Darling Girl. I suggest tea, but she’d rather have a drink and says she’ll “come round” to pick me up at five thirty. She emails to tell me she’ll be late, then again to say that she’s early. When I find her in the lobby, she’s wearing slim leather pants and a long black coat. Her purse looks like a pirate’s treasure sack.
Our first stop is the “social club” she belongs to, down the block and underground. A wood-paneled, dusty room, low ceilings, and cigarettes smoked inside. Nellie orders red wine, so I do, too, fiddling nervously with the strings of my purse. She introduces me to various Wilde-ish characters and mentions Aristotle, Ibsen, and George Michael in one breath (that last one is her neighbor). She orders us new glasses of wine before I’m done with my first, then realizes that we’re late for our dinner reservation at J. Sheekey. She leads me through the West End by the hand, tells me this restaurant is where her parents would always take her if she’d made good grades or needed a talking-to. She tells me about secret affairs and secret passageways. She loves walking, does miles every day.
At J. Sheekey, a fancy old fish restaurant where they systematically ask whether you’re trying to make it to a theater engagement before you sit down, she orders expertly, white wine and tiny fried fishes and other things I’m squeamish about eating, but when they come they are purely delicious, like butter or syrup. My face is getting warm, and I may already be sharing too much. I’m supposed to have drinks with friends in an hour, but she begs me to cancel and come back to her house. “It’s an unusual place and I want you to meet everyone and everyone wants to meet you.”
In the cab to her house, we talk. About why we write, what its purpose is when, she says, “the world is full of so much shit we can’t fix.”
“And in our work, we create a better or clearer universe,” I tell her breathlessly. “Or at least one that makes more sense.”
“A place we’d want to live, or can at least understand.” She nods, satisfied. “You’re really smart.”
I realize I’ve never talked to anyone else about this, much less a woman my own age. I’ve never talked to anyone my own age about anything beyond ambition. Technique, passion, philosophy, we don’t touch any of that.
She asks me my worst quality, and I say I can be very self-involved. She says hers is that she gets lost in the world of her work and can’t find her way back out again.
The city is changing, from bustling metropolis to tree-lined streets and grand houses with only a few lights on. (Google “British lawns” if you want to know what I’m talking about.) When we reach her house we step out into the wet night. The cobblestones are hard to navigate in heels, and I cling to Nellie’s arm. I am sure I’ve never been any place like this. It has the grandeur of a fairy tale and the grit of a Mike Leigh movie. I breathe in, wet street and distant smoke. I guess she paid for the cab.
She opens the door into a library that looks like a set from an episode of Masterpiece Theatre, aged books scattered everywhere. They even spill out of a fireplace.
“Hello!?” she calls out. A deranged French bulldog bounds down the grand staircase, baring her teeth. “Oh, come on, Robbie.”
A girl wearing animal ears hops out from a secret door. She greets me with a hug, and I follow them to a living room where four or five roommates congregate over a bottle of red wine. Each is introduced to me as an actor or a literature student or both. Her sister, another imp with impossibly well-thought-out hair, has a funny phlegmy laugh.
I know I shouldn’t drink anymore, or should at least temper it with a few handfuls of the crisps they are passing around. No one can explain how they came to live here. Nellie hops up, discarding her coat while announcing that it’s freezing. “Let me show you round,” she says.
I take in every detail of the house like I’m six again and reading a picture book, scanning the illustrations carefully. Next to a marble fireplace lies an issue of Elle, a torn thigh-high stocking, an empty pack of Marlboros, a half-eaten pudding cup. And each room leads to another, like one of those New York real-estate dreams where you open a hidden door and discover massive rooms you didn’t even know you had. I spill some of my wine down the front of my dress.
Nellie’s bedroom contains a freestanding claw-foot tub, and I eye all her books and clippings with a pathetic level of interest. Nellie says she spent all of yesterday in bed with an off-limits woman, recovering from a night that undid her. I tell her again how much I love her work, which I really do. She works with themes, memes, metaphors. Uses formal tricks beyond
my grasp.
“Nobody our age writes like you,” I tell her.
“Thank you, thank you,” she says.
Back in the living room they’ve started blasting old-school rap, and my glass has been refilled. I can’t sit without my skirt riding up. Jenna, a pretty girl known for playing Anne Frank on the West End, gives Nellie a fat kiss on the mouth and says, “Hello, I’m home.” I feel most warmly toward Aidan, a former child actor of ambiguous sexuality who has the soft delivery of a boy working in a flower shop.
They are teaching me all sorts of new British terms—such as lairy, which means “rowdy” or “drunkenly mischievous,” and they use it in all sorts of contexts for me: “I got pretty lairy after a few drinks and next thing I know I was hanging from the chandelier.”
They refill my glass and then refill it again. We are laughing, laughing at faces and sounds and objects, then suddenly everything goes in waves, and my vision narrows in a way that can only mean vomit.
As soon as I announce it, it’s happening. A torrent released on their heretofore intact cream carpet. I feel the hot, acidic remains of my dinner running down my chin and hitting the floor, and I’m too sick to be self-conscious. It’s too much of a relief to care that every English treat I have eaten that day, along with glass upon glass of red wine, is now decorating their floor. Nellie pets my head, cooing endearments. I rear up, look around. Everyone is just where I left them except Aidan, who reappears with a broom and dustpan that he uses to sweep up my barf like it’s packing peanuts or hair trimmings. He insists he does this all the time. I’m still not embarrassed.
Nellie moves in close to me.
“You have such a beautiful face,” she tells me. “Such amazing eyes. You’re so fit.”
“Are you kidding?” I slur. “You’re a perfect-looking creature. And so smart. And I feel … I feel like I understand you.”