Girls, The End

Thank you, Lynn Steger Strong, for a great conversation

Over the past few weeks I have been in conversation with novelist Lynn Steger Strong about Girls, the TV show made by Lena Dunham, Jenni Konner, and Judd Apatow about a decade ago. This has been a wonderful exchange as we both know the show well and we are both teachers of writing obsessed with craft. It was gratifying to apply our knowledge to the show and consider how it resembles a novel, including the beautiful ending that we discuss today. I rarely have such an extended conversation about anything (well, my husband and I have talked about our child for thirty-two years) and my confidence in the project grew as learned I to trust that Lynn and I could go anywhere with our interest. It was also so pleasurable to have this conversation via email, almost like my old favorite, letters. I feel so fortunate this opportunity came my way. It has been a respite from what weighs on all of us now.

Thank you all for joining in with comments on the posts, the many emails you have written me, and with reading.

AED: I really love that you know the show as well as I do! It's so pleasurable to trust that you know every brief flicker I am referring to, and I love being transported into the scenes you bring up. Before we wrap up, please tell me what you thought of the end? And...did this thinking about the show inspire you to want to try something in your own work?

LSS: A thing I think a lot about is how endings often fail not because of the ending itself but because of all the moments leading up not teaching us how to experience them. Hannah gets a plum job at a University upstate. Hannah has a baby. Marnie comes to help; there is that incredible moment when Marnie says, so Marnie-like, I WIN, because it is she and Hannah (not Jessa, not Elijah, not Adam) at the end. I fucking love that moment. (and Marnie is a character, every re-watch, I fall more and more in love with). But then, of course, trapped upstate with Hannah and her new baby Grover, the isolation, Hannah's neediness, the lack of male attention, eventually wears on Marnie and she is set to leave in that last episode. (Also, and I say this as someone who adored nursing, it is so perfect to me that Marnie is a breastfeeding evangelist). 

We end alone with Hannah and Grover: I love a landing, of a chapter, of a sentence, of a paragraph that is an image, and, the image of Grover finally latching onto Hannah's breast: Hannah wanting, finally, to be able to give to another person, but then, that person not wanting it at first (that person is a baby so I'm not sure there's much agency there), but he fights her; it's frustrating, exhausting, but finally she lets herself give into it; he latches. He needs something and she is able to give it to him. The very matchy matchy idea that her parents cut her off in the first episode, and now, here she is, letting someone take from her. I loved nursing for exactly this reason: someone wants and needs something that you have and can give to them with such ease and clarity. Hannah struggles with this throughout the six seasons: she doesn’t want to be so self-centered; she wants to love the people in her life better than she sometimes does. So often she simply doesn’t know how to give to other people. But this is physical, embodied, and, though difficult at first, straightforward. It's also two bodies giving to one another, comfort, sustenance, in the same way, in the opening image, Hannah and Marnie spoon. 

What do we think about this as an ending? I guess, part of the power of the novelistic aspect of the show (and also part of my being particularly impressionable if and when you make me care about a character) is that I don't want to judge the credulity of the whole thing. Sure, likely, Hannah doesn't get that job. Likely, that professorial line came open only because somebody died and likely some dean with no immediate knowledge of the department decided, after stringing along an adjunct or two and then interviewing a handful of people who were significantly more qualified than Hannah, to use that money to add on to the gym and/or the cafeteria. And/but, this is fiction! I'm glad for Hannah. I love the way she's able to luxuriate in all that space. I love the quiet and the calm of it after all those seasons in that sweaty dark apartment in New York. (This from a person who loves New York City in irrational obscene ways). Watching it this time, more than ten years into my own journey as contingent faculty, I like imagining that that job might exist at all. 

The final string of images leading up to Hannah and Grover alone together is Hannah's dark night of the soul: she leaves the house, leaves Marnie, and her mom with Grover, and she walks around her neighborhood. She hears a young girl screaming, thinks she's in trouble: new-mom like, she wants to help. She realizes, Hannah Horvath-like, the girl is not in trouble at all. Insofar as the girl is in trouble, it is because she's needy and self-centered and (like most every teenager) too quick to get hysterical about other people wanting and needing from her. Hannah is appalled by this young girl's blindness. Hannah is staring at a young girl like she was a young girl, who can't quite figure out how to be a person in the world; she wants to help her and also is appalled by her and that feels right and clear. She walks (barefoot, pantsless; having given her shoes and jeans to this young girl) back to her house, to Grover and Marnie and her mom, with more purpose, more a sense of herself. 

How do you end six years of something satisfyingly? First, the pregnancy feels important, one, because it's a big concrete shift, and two, because it feels important it not be a man. If Hannah's solipsism is one of the show's main interests, it does feel like motherhood might be one of the few things powerful enough to wrench her out of it. 

If we look back at the start and see how it was all planted since the beginning: She does not become the voice of her generation; she becomes a voice, for a slightly younger generation, which...I like as an idea. The dream of being a writer is so different from actually being a writer and/but, it is an incredible gift to get to be a writer in any capacity if it is the thing you love to do. In that first episode, Hannah's parents cut her off, and she is completely without a sense of what that means and how she'll survive in the world, and, in the end, she's found it. (Again, it's complicated that she gets a job that is a sort of fantasy). Jessa has the pregnancy scare/abortion attempt in episode two and that's delivered on here with Hannah's pregnancy and eventual baby. 

I guess then, maybe my answer to the question: what do you think of the ending, is I think the broad sweep of the show taught me to love and care about these people and the ways they delivered on this in the end landed a lot of the ideas the show had been circling in interesting and moving ways. If I pull back out of the last episode (and I am sort of formally narratively obsessed with this idea of the penultimate season, the importance of the moments leading up), like you, maybe my favorite scene in the last season, and maybe the whole show, is Hannah and Adam sitting and eating soup in silence after realizing they aren't going to have a life together. 

Adam is with Jessa, but then he hears that Hannah is pregnant and, for a period of about twelve hours, they both nervously attempt to imagine that they might build a life together after all. If the first season was a will they won't they, with almost no stakes at all, this last moment is the same thing, but grownup; the stakes are so much higher; we know these people now so we know what they're losing and also the history of how and why they're losing it. We know Jessa is somewhere waiting, anxious, desperate. We see each of them slowly realize they are no longer the people they were when the show started. We see them be wise enough not to pretend that this might work. It's everything you want a moment like that to be, imbued with feeling, weight, particularity; it is such a testament to what they've done that in that moment, the characters don't have to talk at all. 

AED: I really love all you say here, Lynn. The question of how this very novelistic series sets up the ending and the path it takes to get there is similar to discussing the inevitability of a novel ending. Hannah is our protagonist, grandiose and vain in the beginning, a classic character who must through the machinations of the plot either dig herself in deeper until the reader is left with no hope for her becoming a wiser, better person—or she must change. The final push toward change begins with her realization that she is pregnant and that she is going to keep the baby. This was so well done. At first I thought, how can Hannah ever take care of a baby, she is still floundering herself, but when she tells first her mother, and then Marnie, they both come around to the idea and so did I. Millions of people have babies when they are not ready, but they have time to get ready in pregnancy, and if they are fortunate to enlist support. Hannah is fortunate. 

Adam is excited by the prospect of raising the baby with her and they go shopping for items that will be needed. That whole sequence is so mind boggling, as you watch you can't believe it is happening, are they really going to set up house together again? We love Hannah and Adam but we also love Adam and Jessa and their relationship isn't finished, the sense that there is more to it hovers over the Adam-Hannah scenes and we sense that they are only playing even before we come to fully know it. Really? Really? But the fantasy is appealing so we go along until Hannah can't. The moment when her eyes fill with tears during the soup scene, though devastating, gave me hope and a new faith in her. She is not messing around anymore, she can't go backward to fix her future.

Adam and Hannah both grow up a notch in that scene, he returns to Jessa afterward and she, a model of discipline, accepts his walkabout and lets him back in, while Hannah moves forward and secures a university job based on her expertise on the Internet (har har) and she rents another big house in the country, shades of her failed attempt to move to Iowa. Elijah gets a Broadway role, Shoshana is engaged and breaks up with the group, Ray inherits Hermie's businesses and possessions and is stable and established, we last see Desi abandoning his motorcycle and walking off into the night, his pretensions stripped away, and Marnie is schooled in her self-deception by a pawn broker to whom she tries to sell her important jewelry—all fake. She "takes responsibility" for her own life, leaves a message for Desi saying he doesn't owe her anything, and moves to her mother's sofa to regroup.Then she decides to  move to the new house with Hannah to help with the baby, annoying her by singing “Fast Car” during their car ride. She hasn't figured things out when she goes with Hannah, but her desire to help is sincere and evidence of her new awareness of others' needs. Now it's Hannah's turn, the final battle is engaged for her personhood if not her soul.

Earlier this semester in my short story class we had a discussion about the dark night of the soul and we made lists of how it can be represented. The person must be in extremis and enter into a space where they are either literally or figuratively blinded. They must not be able to see or reason their way out, there must be a dramatic reckoning that moves them forward. (A mistake that ruins many endings, the solution is arrived at by thinking, which works in life but not in a dramatic representation of life.) In Hannah's case, as you say, she is upset by the frustration of her baby Grover preferring Marnie to her, the constant pumping she does because Grover isn't drinking enough of her milk, and so on. Finally she is so upset she runs out into the night and is alone in the dark, just the conditions for a change to implant into her psyche.

Lo and behold, she runs into an apparition, another one of the angels who moves her along. This time it isn't a writer like Tally or an artist like Mimi Rose, but a teenager, tall and blond and very much evoking a classical depiction of an angelic visitation, who is upset and running away. The girl is in her underwear and Hnanah takes off her own jeans and gives them to the girl so she can restore her dignity and be protected. The interaction between them is so funny—Hannah's jeans swim on the girl and Hannah explains that they are meant to be big. There is a lot of back and forth before it comes out that the abuse the girl has sufferedthat made her run out into the night is that her mother told her to do her homework. Hannah lectures her on what a mother's job is with a fresh authority and maturity, she is no longer the inappropriate teacher who makes best friends with an eighth grader in her classroom, but a mature mother herself who, even if she has to hear herself explain it aloud to fully grasp it, finally gets the role.

She demands the jeans back. The girl runs away in them, trying to hold them up, and Hannah walks back to her house in her underwear, trailed by a benevolent local police. Marnie and her mother and sitting on the front step waiting for her, and when she arrives they hear Grover cry upstairs. Marnie gets up and says she'll go, but Hannah, a newly rinsed person full of clarity and confidence, says no, she'll go. She goes upstairs and picks up her baby, settles with him in a rocking chair, and coaxes him to partner with her in the nursing project. For the first time she communicates with him so he knows what to do and he latches on. The look on her face is ... surprised inevitability, maybe? That is the end, except for hearing Hannah sing "Fast Car" over the black credit cards, finishing on the words, be someone, be someone. So touching and beautiful. She has achieved her goal of being the voice of her generation in speaking truth to the apparition of the teen in the night. It is not the self-involved truth she thought she was going to tell when the series began and she expected her parents to support her, but it is the hard won truth she needs to hear herself, and she does. Taking the time and the trouble to set the girl straight affords a reversal she could not have imagined when she ran into the dark completely flustered earlier that evening. She now knows how to give, and her gift is received by Grover, her baby. Hannah has become someone.

How brilliant and satisfying it is. 

So...final thoughts, and what you have taken from the show for your own work?

LSS: First, I think a sort of meta-response to this question of how this conversation has informed my work is to just say how fun it's been to do this: first to be in conversation with you and second to delight in someone else's work instead of to be critical of it. About twenty times a day I think about how I should stop trying to be a writer, I wonder about the value of what we do, I worry over its import or utility. I hate the ways so much of the internet is built to flatten people and what they make: this was bad! that was dumb! etc. the way the ultimate sign of intelligence can sometimes seem to be the first one to name something other people love as actually not good enough. I hate this most of all because it stops the conversation. It declares judgment and presupposes a superiority to that judgment and then there is so much less space to talk about whatever the thing is. 

I've appreciated first the way that talking to you about this shared appreciation has richened it for me, expanded my sense of what it is, helped me re-consider how I might look at making things, character, and story, differently. I have a sort of long held belief that art, at its best, is one long messy conversation and this has felt like an exciting and enriching extension of that. And I've also appreciated how wonderful it feels to just like a thing and not feel weird or afraid to like it, not feel as if I'm somehow secretly showing the ways that I'm not smart enough to also see the ways the show has of course fallen short. 

This feels instructive specifically in my own work first with regard to what it might feel like to make a book that has the texture of a conversation, that might shift between registers and forms, that might see the same idea or person or work of art from different vantage points. I also think it was a useful reminder that there is such a thing as the good faith reader; that you might as well make the sharpest, weirdest, most particular version of what you want to make and just trust, hope, whatever, that for everyone who wants to poke at it, to declare it bad and LOL about it, there are also readers like you who want to relish in the ways it did something to them. 

With regard to the show itself, I think two big things: the first, and the thing that got me re-watching to begin with, is to think about a group of friends as an organism in the same way I've spent the past few years thinking about the family. I love the texture of a highly peopled novel. I love groups and alliances and tensions and the ways they shift and alter and then shift and alter the people who exist inside them over time. I know my next book is a friendship novel and it's been endlessly instructive to think about this organism of girls specifically: the phone calls, people missing one another, the way when timelines don't match up--Hannah in Iowa and everybody else moving on--it can feel like betrayal; the ways we don't or can't always keep track of when and why the stakes have been raised. 

I also think this idea of characters built out of types has been incredibly instructive to me. I love to think about the layers necessary to make a character real-feeling, the small surprises, the weird ticks, etc, but I also think there's a lot to be learned and gained from building a character from an initial seed of type. How easy it is to have a basic idea of Marnie in just a few scenes, same with Jessa, same with Hannah, how that lets the reader feel close to her early, or at least to think they understand her, only to find small (and then larger) opportunities to remind us of how wrong we were or are about what that type might be. 

AED: For some reason, I don't know exactly why, I have never questioned my own taste. I have pushed it toward more refinement, but I have never had a guilty pleasure. If I don't like things I move on. If I like them I am not ashamed of it. Why criticize? It's so easy, the easiest intellectual activity there is. Which is not to deny the value of real, educated criticism. I read it, I love it. It's that other thing, the one you are pointing at, the hot takes, the snarky posts, the bad reviews. Tawdry stuff. Dear Lord, I pray thee to guide me away from snickering at the efforts of others. 

Teaching, for me, reinforces the focus on value. I teach work I love and in preparing it for teaching and looking at it closely, seeing the author appear behind the text, toiling away, I love and appreciate it more. If I don't love a book or a TV show or a piece of music I put it down like it's a snake. Nope! So I agree, it is a pleasure to have a long conversation in depth about a show we both love and appreciate and to say why and what we love. This has made me very happy, too, Lynn—I am a big believer in quantity time and talking things all the way through but I rarely have the opportunity. I feel quite fulfilled by this conversation, it has been a long fragrant bath.

Talking about Girls has helped me remember what I really want to write about, and how. The show is so bold and so seemingly oblivious to the kind of considerations people get involved with as we grow older, like the marketplace. Lena Dunham had the huge advantage of having her work accepted and supported in her twenties, when most people are floundering to figure out what a plot is or where to send their work. She got lucky. The talent was there, but many are talented. She was also ready, a quality that narrows down the numbers of people who might get luck. Most aren't ready in their twenties. But she was also lucky. 

Watching the show with you emboldened me, and I needed that.

LSS: I’m going to put a good number of what you just said on a post-it to add to the wall of post-its I keep on my computer and also in random places on my office/bedroom wall. I just did a final pass on the novel that I’m publishing next year, and I think the gift of being in this world this long is the very clear knowledge that luck and timing are as much a part of success as skill and talent, so you might as well just make whatever you most want to make. I think Dunham did that. I think you also do. The thing I kept thinking, reading through this novel, which feels inside of everything you said above was, just mean it, don’t be scared to say the thing that you most mean. You’ve emboldened me too, Alice. And also, at a moment when I feel scared and uncertain nearly all the time, I am so grateful for how fun, indulgent, and communal this has felt each week.