- Mark Schafer
- Lena Dunham is Hannah Horvath—and the other way around.
With its portrayals of obsessive-compulsive behaviors, blundering social skills, and cringe-worthy sexual encounters, Girls remains one of the most subversive shows to come out of the mainstream.
Dunham, however, isn’t without an accomplished sense of irony. Earlier in the fourth season, Hannah’s fellow graduate students discuss her writing during a workshop, and point out how she routinely writes about a character that’s undistinguishable from herself. Her classmates think the transparent use of her own life experience is uninspired and trite. And although she’s upset by their attacks on her writing, Hannah is unmoved—and, we can imagine, neither is Dunham.
Whereas Wallace defines the adjective “creative” as, “signify[ing]…some goal(s) other than sheer truthfulness [that] motivates the writer and informs her work,” and “[t]his creative goal, broadly stated, may be to interest readers . . . to get readers to look more closely at or think more deeply about something that’s worth their attention . . .” Wallace deliberately advocates against sharing or expressing oneself for the sole purpose of expressing. Dunham fails to follow this rule—her book, though it isn’t a work of creative nonfiction, exists so she can write about herself. Her book, though not a work of fiction, insists on its existence for Dunham’s interest in enlightening other woman/individuals on her mistakes and hopefully sways others into not making the blunders she’s made…in other words; it exists for Dunham to write about herself.
