Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's Learned

by Lena Dunham

  16. Do not make jokes about concealing drugs, weapons, or currency in front of police officers or TSA workers. There is nothing funny about being detained.

  17. It’s all about tailoring.

  Dear Blanken Blankstein,

  Remember when I ran into you last summer at the coffee place near your house? I was with a bunch of guys from my work and you were with some guys from yours. Some of them wore “wifebeaters” and looked like wife beaters. I was rendered speechless by your tangled Rip Van Winkle beard, which I didn’t get close enough to smell but can imagine presents massive hygiene challenges. It clearly took major effort to grow, and that is the biggest signal I’ve received to date that your emotional equilibrium is off. I shook like a dry drunk because I was so scared you’d yell at me for the thing I wrote about you. I said sorry a lot that day. Your expression was so stormy, I just wanted to calm you down. Plus, I was trying to be adult around my coworkers, a concept you would know nothing about, you coke-nosed dick-swinger.

  But I’m actually not sorry at all. You weren’t kind to me, so I have nothing to be sorry about. I’m sick of saying stuff I don’t mean.

  As you were,

  Lena

  p.s. All my work friends thought you looked like a puppet of a hipster. Your pants are so high waisted I could cry. I don’t care what your work friends thought of me. I hadn’t showered in four days and I still have a boyfriend last I checked.

  Dear Dr. Blank,

  My eardrum was punctured, you WHITECOAT. And you treated me like a psycho with a little scrape, like an exhausting roadblock between you and your lunch. I cried when you poured the solution down my earhole and you just held me in place. I had to beg for painkillers like a junkie. Who gave you a license? This has since become my most traumatic memory, usurping the premature death of a friend and the time I saw a woman with a gaping pink hole where her nose ought to be. I resent that.

  Lena

  Dear Mrs. Blank,

  You are literally schizophrenic, so it’s futile to answer your email, BUT I gotta say: you are bananas. I understand that you come from a generation of women who had to work hard to be heard, but for you to impugn my feminism and act as though I’m a scourge upon women everywhere, just because I refuse to spread your particular agenda? That’s dark, and it’s not what you fought for. If you continue this way, you’re worse than they are (they = men). We are all just trying to get by. There is room for all of us. Also, “cudgeled” isn’t a word people use. I’m going to live at least fifty years past you.

  Sincerely,

  Lena

  Dear Blanka,

  Remember when you said you “forgave” me for my movie? Well, I don’t forgive you for saying that. I am sorry that I questioned whether you were a real lesbian. That was lame of me and you clearly are a lesbian. I love lesbians. But you know what else is lame? Your neon overalls. D. J. Tanner called and she wants her wardrobe back so it can be included in a museum retrospective about the prime years of Full House.

  Ugh, get it together!

  LD

  Dear Blanky Blankham,

  We had been friends since fourth grade. You used to bring flowers to my screen door, take me out on the lake in your dinghy, show me how to catch frogs. We had a childhood together. So when I gave you a blow job (MY FIRST) on the day my cat died, you should have called. Your total disappearance made so many sweet memories feel so grimy. I found out about your fiancée on Facebook. How many inches taller than you is she? Like, ten? The fact that the government lets you fly planes seems insane.

  Your little friend,

  Lena

  p.s. I never picked up the cat’s ashes because I associated it with giving blow jobs and being abandoned. When I finally got up the courage to collect them two years later, they had been thrown into a mass grave. I blame you.

  THIS IS THE NAME of the memoir I’m going to write when I’m eighty. You know, once everyone I’ve met in Hollywood is dead.

  It will be a look back at an era when women in Hollywood were treated like the paper thingies that protect glasses in hotel bathrooms—necessary but infinitely disposable.

  It will be excerpted in Vanity Fair along with photos of me laughing at a long-ago premiere, wearing a pom-pom strapped to my head, sipping a cran and seltzer, subtly pregnant with my first set of twins.

  It will be endorsed by the female president, and I’ll enjoy a real surge in popularity with college girls writing term papers on the history of the gender gap.

  I can’t wait to be eighty.

  So I can have an “oeuvre”—or at least a “filmography.”

  So I can impress my grandkids with my brooch collection.

  So I can send things back in restaurants without shame and use a wheelchair at the airport.

  So I can shock people by saying “rim job” in casual conversation.

  So I can dye my bowl cut orange.

  And so I can name names. Delicious, vengeful names. And I won’t give a shit about doing battle with someone’s estate because I’ll be eighty and, quite possibly, the owner of seventeen swans.

  I’ll tell everyone about what the men I met in Hollywood said to me that first whirlwind year:

  “I just want to protect you.”

  “I know we just met, but I consider you a close friend.”

  “You’re a funny girl.”

  “You’re a clever kid.”

  “I’ll bet you never say no.”

  “You should be a little more grateful.”

  “You’re prettier than you let yourself be.”

  “I hope your boyfriend makes you feel good. You have a boyfriend, don’t you?”

  “You know, a lot of men can’t handle a powerful woman.…”

  “You’ve grown very cute since I last ran into you.”

  I’ll recount all the interactions where I went from having an engaging conversation on craft with a man to hearing about his sexual dissatisfaction with his wife, who used to be passionate and is currently on fertility drugs. Suddenly, we’re talking about the way his college girlfriend left her boots on when she fucked and how marriage is “a lot of hard work.”

  What that translates to is: My wife doesn’t turn me on and you aren’t a model but you sure are young and probably some bold new sexual moves have emerged since the last time I was single in 1992 so let’s try it and then you can go back to being married to your work and I’ll go back to being married to an “eco-friendly interior decorator” and I’ll never watch any of your films again.

  I’ll talk about how I never fucked any of them. I fucked guys who lived in vans, guys who shared illegal lofts with their ex-girlfriends who were away at Coachella, guys who were into indigenous plant life, and guys who watched PBS.

  But I never fucked them.

  I’ll talk about the way these relationships fell apart as soon as they realized I wasn’t going to be anyone’s protégée, pet, private fan club, or eager plus-one.

  The subtle accusation: “You’re not so easy to track down.”

  The sensitive inquiry: “What’s goin’ on here, honey?”

  The rageful indictment: “You’re a bullshit liar. Doesn’t anyone your age have any fucking manners?”

  My friend Jenni calls them Sunshine Stealers. Men who have been at it a little too long, who are tired of the ride but can’t get off. They’re looking for some new form of energy, of approval. It’s linked with sex, but it’s not the same. What they want to take from you is way worse than your thong in the back of their Lexus. It’s ideas, curiosity, an excitement about getting up in the morning and making things.

  “Oh,” she’ll tell me when I mention the only guy I talked to at a boring dinner party. “Another Sunshine Stealer.”

  “That one,” she says about a seemingly charming visionary. “He’s the OG Sunshine Stealer.”

  When I’m eighty, I’ll describe the time I sat with a director in his hotel suite while he told me girls love it when you “direct” their blow jobs.

>   “Oh, wow,” I answered. I mean, how else do you answer?

  “I don’t know,” he said. “They just dig it.”

  I’ll describe the pseudo-date I went on with a man whose work I admired. I wore a white dress with only one stain, and we barreled downtown in a cab, and I leaned back against the torn pleather seat and thought, I’ve really done it, I’m a grown-ass woman now. And at 4:00 A.M. when I tried to kiss him he stayed stone faced. I hit his side mouth, and I turned on my heels and took off down the block at a speed I’ve never achieved before or since. I felt so ashamed. My first and only misstep of this kind, and he’d be able to tell them all: She’s weak, she’s just like the rest of them. She wants it.

  I’ll describe another, even-older filmmaker and how, following him down the street after a drink, I realized that he limped a little, unexplained. And I’ll describe the email he wrote me after I said I couldn’t work on his film because I was making my own show. “How could you dismiss this opportunity to be a small part of a film that will be taught in colleges for years to come in exchange for the utter ephemera of a ‘TV Pilot.’ ” In quotes! He put it IN QUOTES!

  And I read the email again and again, shocked, jaw set with rage so that I couldn’t make a sound. And I imagined my own pain, my anger, magnified by fifty in the man who would send that email, the person who believes that life is a zero-sum game and girls are there to be your props, that anyone else’s artistry is a mere distraction from the Lord’s grand plan to promote your agenda. How painful that must be, how suffocating. And I decided then that I will never be jealous. I will never be vengeful. I won’t be threatened by the old, or by the new. I’ll open wide like a daisy every morning. I will make my work.

  I’ve imagined the Sunshine Stealers, around a long conference table like the members of the Cabinet, in dialogue about me. She’s sly and manipulative, one says. She’ll do anything to get what she wants, says another. You have to be a hell of a lot prettier than that to fuck your way to the top. An especially old one chimes in: I had some great times with her, man, nice girl, wonder what’ll become of her.

  But the scariest thought of all is the one that pushed me to keep making contact well past the point that I became uncomfortable, to try and prove myself again and again. The reason I didn’t stop answering their calls, that I rushed to drinks dates that were past my bedtime and had conversations that didn’t interest me and forced myself to sit at the table long after I’d grown uncomfortable. The thought I worked so vigilantly to ensure they would never entertain: She’s silly. She’s no threat.

  My friend, a woman whom I admire for her independent spirit, told me she had a similar experience. “I made my first movie and all these men crawled out of the woodwork, looking for … something.” She was once a punk. The real kind, not the kind who buys her clothes at the mall. “But they didn’t get it: I’m not here to make friends with you. I’m here to destroy you.”

  I told her I was out of the danger zone now, but for a moment there my phone ringing at 2:00 A.M. became an instrument of terror. Who had my number that didn’t know how to use it appropriately? A message, delivered in low tones: “If you have a moment, I’d love to talk. You’re a good listener.”

  You know why I listened? Because I wanted it so bad. Because I wanted to learn, to grow and to stay.

  Oh, look, they said to themselves, it’s a cute little director-shaped thing.

  Just wait until I’m eighty.

  I AM EIGHT and I am afraid of everything.

  The list of things that keep me up at night includes, but is not limited to: appendicitis, typhoid, leprosy, unclean meat, foods I haven’t seen emerge from their packaging, foods my mother hasn’t tasted first so that if we die we die together, homeless people, headaches, rape, kidnapping, milk, the subway, sleep.

  An assistant teacher comes to school with bloodshot eyes, and I am convinced he’s infected with Ebola. I wait for blood to trickle from his ear or for him to just fall down dead. I stop touching my shoelaces (too filthy) or hugging adults outside of my family. In school, we are learning about Hiroshima, so I read Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes and I know instantly that I have leukemia. A symptom of leukemia is dizziness and I have that, when I sit up too fast or spin around in circles. So I quietly prepare to die in the next year or so, depending on how fast the disease progresses.

  My parents are getting worried. It’s hard enough to have a child, much less a child who demands to inspect our groceries and medicines for evidence that their protective seals have been tampered with. I have only the vaguest memory of a life before fear. Every morning when I wake up there is one blissful second before I look around the room and remember my daily terrors. I wonder if this is what it will always be like, forever, and I try to remember moments I felt safe: In bed next to my mother one Sunday morning. Playing with Isabel’s puppy. Getting picked up from a sleepover just before bedtime.

  One night my father becomes so frustrated by my behavior that he takes a walk and doesn’t come back for three hours. While he’s gone, I start to plan our life without him.

  My fourth-grade teacher, Kathy, is my best friend at school. She’s a plump, pretty woman with hair like yellow pipe cleaners. Her clothes resemble the sheets at my grandma’s house, threadbare florals with mismatched buttons. She says I can ask her as many questions as I want: about tidal waves, about my sinuses, about nuclear war. She offers vague, reassuring answers. In hindsight they were tinged with religion, implied a faith in a distinctly Christian God. She can tell when I’m getting squirrelly, and she shoots me a look across the room that says, It’s okay, Lena, just give it a second.

  When I’m not with Kathy I’m with Terri Mangiano, our school nurse, who has a buzz cut and a penchant for wearing holiday sweaters all year round. She has a no-nonsense approach to health that comforts me. She presents me with statistics (only 2 percent of children develop Reye’s syndrome in response to aspirin) and tells me that polio has been eradicated. She takes me seriously when I explain that I’ve been exposed to scarlet fever by a kid on the subway with a red face. Sometimes she lets me lie on the top bunk in the back room, dark and cool. I rest my cheek against the plastic mattress cover and listen to her administer pills and pregnancy tests to high school girls. If I’m lucky, she doesn’t send me back to class.

  No one likes the way things are going so, at some point, therapy is suggested. I am used to appointments: allergist, chiropractor, tutor. All I want is to feel better, and that overrides the fear of something new, something reserved for people who are crazy. Plus, both my parents have therapists, and I feel more like my parents than anybody else. My father’s therapist is named Ruth. I’ve never met her, but I asked him to describe her to me once. He said she was older, but not as old as Grandma, with longish gray hair. In my head, her office has no windows, it’s just a box with two chairs. I wonder what Ruth thinks of me. He has to have said something.

  “Can’t I just see Ruth?” I ask. He explains that it doesn’t work that way, that I need my own place to have my own private thoughts. So I take the train uptown with him to meet someone of my own. For some reason, when we go to appointments to help my mind, it’s always my father who comes. My mother comes to the ones for my body.

  The first doctor, a violet-haired grandma-aged woman with a German surname, asks me a few simple questions and then invites me to play with the toys scattered across her floor. She sits in a chair above me, pad in hand. I have the sense she will gather all kinds of information from this, so I put on a show that I’m sure will demonstrate my loneliness and introspection: Bootleg Barbie crashes her convertible with off-brand Ken riding shotgun. Tiny Lego men are killed in a war against their own kind. After a long period of observation, she asks me to share my three greatest wishes. “A river, where I can be alone,” I tell her, impressed with my own poeticism. From this answer, she will know that I am not like other nine-year-olds.

  “And what else?” she asks.

  “That’s all.”
>
  I leave feeling worse than when I went in, and my father says that’s okay, we can see as many doctors as we need to until I’m better. Next we visit a different woman, even older than the first, but she’s named Annie, which is not an old person’s name. We walk up four or five flights to her office, which is also her living room. My father sits with me this time and helps me explain the things that worry me. Annie is sympathetic, with a funny high laugh, and when we walk out into the night on Bank Street, I tell my father she is the one.

  But we are just here to get a referral, my father tells me. Annie is retiring.

  And so my third session is with Robyn. Robyn’s office is down the block from our apartment and, sensing some trepidation, my mother pulls me aside and says to think of it like a play date. If I like playing with her, I can go back. If not, we’ll find someone else for me to play with. I nod, but I’m well aware that most play dates don’t revolve around someone trying to figure out whether you’re crazy or not.

  In our first session, Robyn sits on the floor with me, her legs tucked under her like she’s just a friend who has come by to hang out. She looks like the mom on a television show, with big curly hair and a silky blouse. She asks me how old I am, and I respond by asking her how old she is—after all, we’re sitting on the floor together. “Thirty-four,” she says. My mother was thirty-six when I was born. Robyn is different from my mother in lots of ways, starting with her clothes: a skirt-suit, sheer tights, and clean black high heels. Different from my mother, who looks like her normal self when she dresses as a witch for Halloween.

  Robyn lets me ask her whatever I want. She has two daughters. She lives uptown. She’s Jewish. Her middle name is Laura, and her favorite food is cereal. By the time I leave, I think that she could fix me.

  The germophobia morphs into hypochondria morphs into sexual anxiety morphs into the pain and angst that accompany entry into middle school. Over time, Robyn and I develop a shorthand for things I’m too embarrassed to say: “Masturbation” becomes “M,” “sexuality” becomes “ooality,” and my crushes become “him.” I don’t like the term “gray area,” as in “the gray area between being scared and aroused,” so Robyn coins “the pink area.” We eventually move into her adult office but stay sitting on the floor. We’ll often share a box of Special K or a croissant.