Lena Dunham is a polarizing figure, someone you want to, but struggle to, love thanks to her enduring ability to always say the wrong thing, to apologize but seemingly never learn. Her confusing hypocrisy, as someone who pushes herself as an advocate for social justice yet so often makes ignorant decisions and statements publicly is what makes her so intriguing, and why her profile on The Cut spans almost 7000 words.
You can learn almost everything you would want to know about Lena's personality from the interview. You can understand how she feels about her former business partner Jenni Konner, whom she recently ended her 'intense close friendship' with, hear her explain her enduring struggle with chronic illness and almost feel her pain when she talks about her relationship with Jack Antonoff, whom she broke up with last year. There are certain poignant paragraphs, in fact, that say a lot about who she is and what she's going through right now. Here, we gathered up those gems. Some will make you laugh, some will make you cry, and some will remind you why you're not quite sure about Lena Dunham.
On playing the 'hysterical ex-girlfriend' in real life
'They officially broke up a month after her hysterectomy. It was a mutual decision, she tells me. The breakup felt real to Dunham only when she saw the announcement on E! and paparazzi showed up at her home. She has processed her feelings publicly; her 5.6 million followers saw her tweet out a list of baby names she wrote with Antonoff in 2015. (“Hey @jackantonoff I just found a potential baby name list we made in 2015. I could definitely keep this private, but then the world wouldn’t know that you suggested ‘Carrot’ over and over … Love u!!!”)
'“I still think it’s funny,” she says. After the list went out, she called Antonoff a few times and he didn’t pick up right away. (He was in the studio). When he got back to her, he said, “No, it’s funny.” “He knows that being the hysterical ex-girlfriend is kinda like the weirdest, funniest, public performance.” But it hurts, too, she admits. It hurts looking at his new girlfriend’s Instagram stories (Antonoff is reportedly dating model Carlotta Kohl). “I thought I was kind of proving weird girls can have love too. And now he’s dating somebody who looks regular and normal and like girls are supposed to look.”'
On her current dating life
'For several months, Dunham has been very casually seeing an artist she met through mutual friends. She remembers, right after the hysterectomy, crying to Jemima Kirke, “Who’s gonna want to date me? I have PTSD and no uterus.” Kirke’s answer: “A soldier who hates condoms.” After many months of not being this way, sex is now pain free, and without having that fear or hope of getting pregnant, Dunham describes sex as more chill, “like an intimate high-five.”'
On muting mums on Instagram
'Recently, Dunham — who is in perimenopause at 32 — has been having a hard time looking at pregnant women and new babies, and especially her friends who are having kids. “It’s always like a little catch in the throat when I think about it. It’s all those things like new-baby smell, and breastfeeding, and looking at a baby that you know looks like you.” Dunham sits cross-legged at the edge of her unmade bed. “When I just figured out you could mute Instagram stories, it was such a fucking blessing.”'
On why she thinks she can be so ignorant
'Dunham lists the reasons for the hate — with her explanations for why she is the way she is — as if she were reciting a poem imprinted on her brain in grade school: She grew up privileged in New York, which led to what people perceive as a sense of entitlement. Her parents are Soho art-scene royalty, and she was raised around “very specific, liberal provocateurs,” who taught her she could say things that “might now warrant a trigger warning,” which informs her sense of humor. (For instance: the joke she made on her podcast, Women of the Hour, about never having had an abortion but wishing she had.) Race is a chronic blind spot for her because she didn’t grow up with a lot of diversity in her New York City private school, she explains.'
For reference, here is the list of things she has had to apologise for, according to writer Allison P. Davis:
'An incomplete list of things Dunham has been asked to apologize for: the nondiverse casting on Girls; casting Donald Glover as a black Republican boyfriend the season after she got in trouble for having an all-white cast; saying in an interview, “No one would be calling me a racist if they knew how badly I wanted to fuck Drake”; declaring herself “thin for, like, Detroit”; writing a New Yorker essay called “Dog or Jewish Boyfriend? A Quiz”; constantly being naked; tweeting a photo of herself wearing a scarf around her head like a hijab; accusing a Spanish magazine of airbrushing her photos (it did not); comparing Bill Cosby to the Holocaust; giving Horvath a brown baby at the end of Girls (and casting a baby that was Puerto Rican and Haitian, not half-Pakistani, as the script dictated); comparing the reading of negative Jezebel coverage to getting beaten in the face by an abusive husband; accusing NFL player Odell Beckham Jr. of not wanting to sleep with her; saying she disliked India because of the visible poverty; apologizing but never learning.'
On being lonely
'She also got an apartment in the West Village. “My whole identity was, like, Brooklyn, and now I’m like, Thank you, Lord. I’m back amongst my tribe, which is like old people puttering around the health-food store. If I never see another fucking person in a cool sack dress with their baby again … I just wanna live around old people who are not reminding me every day of my infertility and loneliness. A lot of the stuff that happened last year couldn’t have happened if I was happy in my life, right?” she says. “It was almost like I was throwing a match, burning it down.”'
On how her illness changed her friendships
'Dunham seems to shoulder the blame. “Maybe my illness made me impossible to be close to, maybe my fame made me impossible to be close to … I’ll work that stuff out in the future, but I was not operating in healthy relationship to the people closest to me.” She began her PTSD treatment while Camping was in production, leaving Konner to take care of the show.
'“Now she doesn’t have to absorb whatever bullshit I tweet that day,” Dunham says. “Whatever I do doesn’t have to now be hers, which, I’m sure I’d imagine if I were her, would be a relief.”'
On the cheating rumours about her ex-boyfriend and good friend, Lorde
'It also hurt when it was heavily rumored that Antonoff had very quickly started dating Dunham’s close friend Lorde, whose last album he’d produced. Antonoff defended himself, tweeting that the rumors were “dumb heteronormative gossip,” but it didn’t help that Lorde sat on his lap during the Brooklyn stop of her tour or that both discussed their late-night cereal binges and daily FaceTime sessions on various nightly talk shows and in magazines. Someone even created an obsessively researched viral PowerPoint presentation that made a near-airtight case for Antonoff’s cheating on Dunham. “Actually, I completely respect this girl, because she did a very good job and she was very funny,” says Dunham. But in the bigger picture, “it was so embarrassing,” she says, closing her eyes. “It was awful because I felt like a weird — ” She cuts herself off. “I don’t think anything happened between them. I can never know someone else’s life. I have never spoken to Ella [Lorde] about it. We haven’t talked since Jack and I broke up. It was awful, and I couldn’t do anything about it except trust that what he was saying to me was true.”'
On being called out about her ignorance
'People her own age, however, chafed at the teacher’s-pet status she was accorded, and resented her $3.5 million book deal, but they also paid rabid attention. Over the near-decade of Dunham’s fame, culture has become far more sincere and censorious. Her comedy was cruel in its precision, but the edgy jokes and the navel-gazing worldview weren’t allowed to be the work of an auteur; they were inspected, especially by her peers, for their morality, their political awareness — or their lack thereof. When she was 28, Dunham went to visit a class at Oberlin, her alma mater, and a kid raised his hand and asked, “How does it feel to be a line item in the history of supremacy and oppression?” “I was like, ‘Well, sir, you know a lot of words.’ It was like, by the way, a 21-year-old white Rasta who asked me,” she says. “One I probably would have slept with.”'