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

by Lena Dunham

  She teaches me how to needlepoint, abstract geometric designs in autumnal threads. When I turn thirteen she throws me a private atheistic Bat Mitzvah—just us two—where we eat half a pound of prosciutto. She tells me that soon she’ll be getting a real Bat Mitzvah, even though she’s almost forty now.

  One evening I see her on the subway, and our interaction, warm but disorienting, inspires a poem, the last lines of which are: “I guess you are not my mother. You will never be my mother.” I make her a painting, a girl with big Keane eyes crying violet tears, and she tells me that she’s hung it in her bathroom, along with a free-form nude I did using gouache. I bring my disposable camera and take pictures of us hanging out and drawing, just like pals do.

  The work we’re doing together helps, but even three mornings a week isn’t enough to stop the terrible thoughts, the fear of sleep and of life in general. Sometimes, to manage the images that come unbidden, I force myself to picture my parents copulating in intricate patterns, summoning the image in sets of eight, for so long that looking at them makes me nauseous.

  “Mom,” I say. “Turn away from me so I won’t think of sex.”

  Sitting with my mother in the beauty salon one afternoon, I come across an article about obsessive-compulsive disorder. A woman describes her life, so burdened with obsessions that she has to lick art in museums and crawl on the sidewalk. Her symptoms aren’t much worse than mine: the magazine’s description of her most horrible day parallels my average one. I tear the article out and bring it to Robyn, whose face crumples sympathetically, as though the moment she’d been dreading had finally arrived. It makes me want to throw my needlepoint supplies in her face. Do I have to do everything myself?

  One day, when I’m fourteen, Robyn warns me that she might get an important call during our session. She’s sorry, but she has to take it, wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t a real emergency. She’s gone for about ten minutes, and when she returns she looks rattled. Takes a deep breath. “So—”

  “Where’s your wedding ring?” I ask her.

  “I’ll see you Wednesday, Leen,” Robyn says, and I pull on my orange parka and head for the elevator. In the waiting room are two teenagers—a blond boy, the kind of underdeveloped but cute thirteen-year-old male that drives seventh-grade gals crazy despite being four-foot-seven, and a pale girl with green streaks in her hair. I stare at her for a moment too long, because I recognize her: she’s the one in the photo in Robyn’s Filofax, which sometimes lies open on her desk. That’s Robyn’s daughter, Audrey.

  I leave the office a beat before they do, but they catch up with me at the elevator, and I’m holding my breath as we ride down together, trying to somehow take her in without looking directly at her. I wish she were a picture in a magazine, so I could stare, rotate the page slightly, stare again.

  Does she know who I am? Maybe she’s jealous. I would be. When we reach the ground floor, she looks right into my face. “He thinks you’re hot,” she says, motioning to her friend, then bolts.

  I step out onto Broadway, beaming.

  What happens over the next few months is like the plot of a children’s movie, the kind where a dog finds its owner in spite of insurmountable odds and prohibitive geography. Through shrewd detective work, Audrey discovers that her camp friend Sarah is my school friend Sarah, and begins passing me notes. They are fat envelopes, decorated with puff paint and star stickers. Inside the first one is a letter, in the kind of fun teen scrawl they use in Saved by the Bell: “HEY YOU SEEM AWESOME! I bet we’d get along. My mom says we would if we could meet. I love shopping, the Felicity soundtrack, oh, and shopping. Here’s a pic of me at the Wailing Wall after my Bat Mitzvah! INSTANT MESSAGE MEEEE.”

  I write back an equally effusive note, laboring over which picture to share, before finally settling on a shot of me lounging on my sister’s bunk bed in a vintage crop top that reads super debbie. “I also luuuv the Felicity soundtrack, animals, acting, and DUH SHOPPING! My screen name is LAFEMMELENA.”

  I know our correspondence is wrong, and so I tell Robyn, who confirms my belief that this is inappropriate. “It’s too bad,” she says, “because I think you two are very similar. You would probably be good friends.”

  When I’m fifteen I stop working with Robyn. I’m ready to stop talking about my problems all the time, I tell her, and she doesn’t fight me. I feel good. My OCD isn’t completely gone, but maybe it never will be. Maybe it’s part of who I am, part of what I have to manage, the challenge of my life. And for now that seems okay.

  Our last session is full of laughter, fancy snacks, talk of the future. I admit how much it hurt me when she reacted with disgust to my belly-button ring, and she says she’s sorry she displayed her personal bias. I thank her for having let me bring my cat into a session and for removing said belly-button ring once it became infected, using a pair of pliers, and, most of all, for having guided me toward wellness. For the first time in many years, I have secrets. Thoughts that aren’t suitable for anyone but me.

  I miss her the way I missed our loft after we moved in seventh grade: sharply, and then not at all. There is too much unpacking to do.

  Within six months, I’m ignoring my homework and skipping class so I can hang out with my pet rabbit Chester Hadley. My parents think I’m depressed, and I think they’re idiots. Because of my medication, I’m sleepy all the time, and I become notorious at school for napping in my hood, snapping to attention the moment a teacher says my name: “I wasn’t sleeping.”

  My fascination with Robyn’s daughter has never died, and our lives overlap just enough that I have a sense of where and how she is: I’m told she pierced her own nose at summer camp and is dating a graffiti artist named SEX. Once, our mutual friend puts us on the phone together, and I can barely speak.

  “Hey!” she growls.

  “It’s you,” I say.

  My struggle is deepening, and my father tells me that I am going to see Margaret, a “learning and organization” specialist who I met with a few times years earlier when my parents discovered I had been stuffing all my unfinished homework under my bed for half the school year. I remember her fondly enough, mostly because she offered Chessmen cookies and orange juice before we set to work on my math homework. When I arrive this time, she doesn’t offer any cookies, but she looks just as I’d left her: wavy red bob, creatively draped black dress, and witch boots. More like my mother than Robyn, but with an Australian accent.

  Her office is a museum of pleasing curiosities: framed seashells, dried pussy willows extending from asymmetrical vases, a coffee table decorated with feathers and stray tiles used as coasters. For a few weeks, we sit at her desk and focus on organizing my backpack, which looks like a crack-addicted hoarder with five toddlers took up residence in its front zipper pocket. She shows me how to keep a datebook and label the sections of a binder and check assignments off when I’ve finished them. Margaret is a psychiatrist as well, and I often see sad children or mismatched couples waiting for her after our session, but this isn’t the place to talk about my feelings. We are all about efficiency, neat edges, prioritizing.

  But one day I come in, melted down by a recurrence of obsessive thoughts and by the milky, sickening feeling my medication is giving me. I don’t have the will to clean out my binder. I had gotten such satisfaction out of the systems she introduced, the sharp pencils and crisp manila folders. But, in a grand metaphor for my worsening state, I have doodled nonsense on all the once-pristine pages. I lay my head on the desk.

  “Do you want to sit on the couch?” Margaret asks.

  Margaret won’t tell me anything about her life. From the start, she makes it clear that we’re here to talk about me. When I ask a question about herself, she tends to ignore it. She isn’t mean about it. Rather, she looks at me with a blank smile that implies I’ve spoken to her in a language she doesn’t understand.

  “Just curious, do you have children?” I ask.

  “What do you think knowing the answer to that would do f
or you?” she asks me, just like shrinks do in movies.

  As a result of her reticence, I develop my own theories about Margaret. One is that she’s a measured and reasonable eater, unable to understand my personal battle with gluttony. I have seen a goat’s milk yogurt in her garbage before, the lid placed neatly back on the empty carton. Another of my theories is that she loves a warm bath. I am sure she loves wildflowers, trains, and heart-to-hearts with wise old women. One day she tells me that as a schoolgirl she was forced to wear a boater hat on field trips. I cling to this image, imagining a tiny Margaret marching to and fro in a long line of girls in hats.

  Then there is the autumn day I come in to find her with a bright, shiny black eye. Before I can even register my shock, she points to it and laughs. “A bit of a gardening accident.” But I believe her. Margaret would never let anyone hit her. She would never let anyone wear shoes indoors. She would always protect herself, her floors, her flowers.

  My father says his friend Burt knew Margaret in the nineties, that she had been “around for a minute,” having a dalliance with a video artist. I imagine their dates: he slides into the booth across from her and asks her how her day was. She just smiles and nods, smiles and nods.

  That Audrey and I wind up at college together is one of the strangest things that has happened, maybe ever, but definitely to me. On the surface, it makes perfect sense: two New York City girls with similar SAT scores and similar authority problems being directed toward the same attainable liberal education by uncreative administrators. But spiritually, I can’t believe it. After all these years of separateness, we are together.

  We bond immediately, more over what we hate than what we love. We both hate lox. We both hate boys in cargo pants. We’re both sick of kids from Long Island saying they’re from New York. We spend the first few weeks of the school year riding our new red bicycles around town in impractical shoes and too much lipstick, unwilling to let go of the idea that city girls do it differently. We can barely hold in our peals of laughter when a boy named Zenith arrives at a party in a shirt that says b is for baller. We set our sights on senior boys who run ironic literary magazines and try to avoid using the bathroom next to anybody but each other.

  Audrey is an intellectual, likes to talk about Fellini and read thick books about tainted presidencies by old bearded men. But she also uses slang more confidently than I ever could and holds her denim miniskirt together with patches from hard-core shows. She cuts her own hair, applies her own liquid eyeliner, and appears to be able to eat as many cookies as she wants without breaking one hundred pounds. We make up funny names for each other: sqeedly-doo, looty, boober.

  We have our first fight three weeks in, when I decide she’s holding me back socially with her misanthropy. “I came here to grow,” I tell her. “And you don’t want that.”

  She runs into the woods of the arboretum sobbing, falls, and scrapes her knee. When I try to help, she cries, “Why would you want to!?”

  I call my mother, who is on Ambien and cheerfully tells me to just “buy a ticket home!” I feel certain and terrified that Audrey is in her room talking to her mother, and that Robyn is mad at me.

  We make up a few days later when, at a brunch potluck, I realize that I do, in fact, hate everybody. Even my new friend Allison, who runs the radio station, and even Becky, who makes vegan muffins and has a quilt composed of Clash t‑shirts. The conversation at college is making me insane: politically correct posturing by people without real politics. Audrey was right: we are all that is good for each other.

  Sometimes Audrey and I are eating cereal, or drying off after the shower, and I see a flash of her mother. Robyn is here: young and naked, my friend.

  Margaret is on vacation, and it’s an emergency. My mother and I are in the worst fight we’ve ever had, one that tests the concept of unconditional love, not to mention basic human decency. And the thing is, no one is right exactly. We both followed our hearts and had no choice but to hurt each other deeply.

  I try Margaret, but, as this is not technically a life-threatening emergency, I don’t leave a message. Next I call my aunt, who I hope will at least tell me I am not a sack of rancid garbage shaped like a human.

  “Your mom isn’t easy, and neither are you,” she says. “I don’t know how you’ll fix it, I just know that you have to.” She suggests I call her friend, “relationship expert” Dr. Linda Jordan. “Linda will have thoughts,” she promises. “And she is great with giving fast and efficient advice.”

  Advice? My therapist has never given me advice. She’s all about making me give myself advice.

  So, about to commit my second major betrayal since the one my mother can tell you all about, I call someone else’s therapist.

  Relationship Expert Dr. Linda Jordan is on a trip to Washington, D.C., with friends from college, so she calls me back from a bench outside the Smithsonian. It turns out we’ve met—years ago, at a Bat Mitzvah—and I vaguely remember her cap of honey hair and a handful of chunky diamond rings. “So, what’s going on?” she asks, with the warm but solution-oriented tone of a high-powered divorce attorney.

  I let it all pour out. What I did. What my mother did back. What we’d both done to each other since we did those first things that we did. “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” Linda says, letting me know she’s with me.

  Finally, I breathe. “So. Am I terrible?”

  For the next twenty minutes, Linda talks. First, she explains some basic “facts” about the mother-daughter relationship. (“You are her possession, but you are also a person.”) Next, she tells me that we’ve both behaved in perfectly understandable, if unpleasant, ways. (“I get it” is a favorite phrase.) “So,” she concludes. “This is actually a chance to reach the next phase of your bond if you will let it be. I know that you can come out of this stronger than before if you can tell her, ‘You’re my mother, and I need you, but in a different way than before. Please let us change, together.’ ”

  I hang up and feel the panic subside for the first time in days: Relationship Expert Dr. Linda Jordan has helped me. And fast. It wasn’t like Margaret, where I talk around something and she nods and we discuss a Henry James novel I’ve only read part of and then we meander back to the topic of my grandmother and how I’d kill to be asleep and then I compliment her shoes, which are, as always, fabulous. I asked a question and Dr. Linda Jordan gave me an answer. And now I have the tools to fix it.

  I hang up the phone and call my mother: “I love you,” I say. “You’re my mother, and I need you, but in a different way than before. Please let us change, together.”

  “That’s fucking bullshit,” she says. I can tell she’s in a store.

  Audrey has had fifteen sinus infections this winter alone so, doctor’s orders, she is having her nose broken, septum straightened, tonsils and adenoids removed. Five of us troop uptown to Robyn’s apartment, where Audrey is recuperating. Before we ring the doorbell we put on Groucho glasses with attached noses and hold up our jug of soup.

  Robyn answers in yoga pants. “The patient is this way,” she says.

  Audrey lies on Robyn’s four-poster bed, nose bandaged, looking even tinier than usual. Robyn climbs onto the bed beside her. “How you feeling, sweetie?”

  The other girls head to the kitchen to unpack the magazines and cookies we bought from a kiosk in the subway. And, as if we’ve done it fifty times before, as if we are a family, I crawl into bed with Audrey and Robyn. We all need to be taken care of sometimes.

  Margaret and I have talked on the phone from just about everywhere. I’ve called her from beaches, speeding vehicles in western states, crouched behind a Dumpster, in the parking lot of my college dormitory, and from my bedroom ten blocks from her office, when I didn’t have the energy to make my way to her couch. From Europe, Japan, and Israel. I’ve whispered to her about guys who were sleeping next to me. Never has the sound of her voice, that calm but expectant hello, not put me at ease. She answers on the second ring, and all my muscles and veins relax.


  On a recent vacation, I call her from the Arizona desert, wearing only my underwear, baking my flesh by a plunge pool. I spend the majority of our session telling her about the furniture shopping my boyfriend and I have done that morning. Our first time making real aesthetic choices as a couple, we successfully selected a coffee table, two bronze deer, and a pair of torn leatherette barstools. Unable to resist, I threw a Cubist ceramic cat into the mix.

  “I really feel like we have similar taste!” I gush, ignoring how unsure she sounds about the addition of kitschy metal animals to a living room.

  “That’s wonderful,” she says. “My husband and I have always had similar taste and it really makes creating a home such a pleasure.” With her accent, “pleasure” sounds like pleeeshuh. Such a pleeshuh.

  Stunned, I wait a beat.

  “It does!” I say. She told me. She told me. She told me.

  Later in the conversation, she references a trip to Paris: “For my husband’s job we go quite regularly.” This is like Christmas. Gift after gift. Not only do I now know she has a husband, I know he is quite possibly French or at the very least EMPLOYED BY FRENCH PEOPLE. This is information I can work with. Next she is going to tell me about her Black Panther college boyfriend and her miscarriage and her best friend, Joan.