What's Girls To You?

A conversation with Lynn Steger Strong

A few summers ago I listened to Want by Lynn Steger Strong during my summer weeks in Maine. I was sent into a state of deep cognitive dissonance by being surrounded by the great natural beauty of Acadia National Park preserved at great cost and having in my ears a compelling novel about a woman grappling with the consequences of her wants, including bankruptcy. I loved the conscience, the vigilance about considering the big picture, the rigor of the protagonist’s thinking, and the humor. I thought—I like this author. Later I read Flight and was again taken with the rigorous thinking, the precision of the sentences, the seriousness about every aspect of the story and the book…but with humor. We corresponded, but we never met. Yet. Now, though, people have new ways of getting to know each other that seems old-fashioned in their deliciousness. Emails, DMs. Lynn and I fell into writing back and forth about the TV show Girls, thinking about why we love it and how it works. Here is the first installment of that conversation. Don’t worry, we will get to the sex on the show soon.

LSS: I just finished the full re-watch of Girls last night on the heels of writing the piece about “Sula”. Ever since reading the book, I’ve been thinking about the longing in, “we were girls together,” and that seems in direct conversation with the space of time this show holds. We end with Hannah having Grover, Shoshanna engaged and “calling it”, with regard to their friendship. You say in your post that you are endlessly interested in girlhood and girl groups, but each of these are fluid and they fade: what do they hold that is so narratively rich? What happens to that richness when we are telling stories about grown women instead?

AED: One of the things that most appeals to me about girls is that they/we are able to have a group be their primary allegiance. As they/we get older there are other attachments, often a partner/family, that is assumed to and usually does take precedence. A lot of the energy that goes into the intricacy of early female friendships bleeds away later. These female worlds are uninteresting in nature to society at large, they don't amount to much, so they go unscrutinized, which allows the girls a degree of freedom they may lose as they grow older and care to be important. I also think a compelling quality of girl groups is that they don't know what's coming. They may think they do, they may even be told or warned, but there is an imperviousness to reality because the group is so compelling, and a sense of protection in numbers. Girls believe they will get more chances; they don't know how circumscribed life becomes based successive choices. In the group the girls feel and are powerful. 

The friendships on Girls are based on college and college adjacent relationships. When they move to New York after Oberlin they replicate dorm life—Hannah and Marnie, and the cousins Jessa and Shoshanna. They and their boyfriends visit back and forth as if they are still in dorms; they don't quite know how to fit boyfriends into their friendships. Isn't this one of the reasons these groups break up? The girls expect to put each other first, and then someone comes along who expects them not to.

Groups of adult women have already accepted this accommodation. They can only throw themselves into a group to a limited degree. Other allegiances are already in place.

I am teaching "Camp Cataract" in class this week, a genius story that takes on the question of primary adult allegiances while being in close touch with the straightforward expectations of girlhood. The strain in Jane Bowles that suspects maturity of being a lesser state of mind is deeply reassuring to me. Girls is more conventional in that the girls all do grow up: sad.

Lynn, what do you think about the same point? 

LSS: I think, for very similar reasons, I'm attracted to the space of friendship among girls because of the privacy that you talk about as well as the sort of murky, uncertainty that this privacy allows. On the one hand, there are fewer external, societal pressures on these relationships, because, if anything, these relationships are considered preliminary, like tryouts, until one's real life begins, so there is a freedom there, an openness. Fewer rules and expectations can also lead to more intensity, more–as Lila and Lenu talk constantly about (both fearfully and lovingly) in Ferrante’s Neapolitan trilogy–blurring and disappearing boundaries. 

While the world isn't looking, girls are learning to love and care for one another; while the world isn't looking, girls are able to enact incredible, indelible harm. In this vein, but from a different angle, this lack of clear boundaries and rules leads to one of my other primary narrative interests, which is all the ways we accidentally hurt or betray one another, but in the name of, with an eye toward, love. Like the phone calls in GIRLS, those moments one reaches out to the other and the other simply doesn't have sufficient information to know they need to show up, those moments when the other person is simply not equipped; there is devastation there, but the culpability isn't completely clear. If these girls were "spouse", "mother", "child" there would be more external guidelines for how to love and care for one another, and/but the lack of these criteria make these relationships both more intense and sometimes more dangerous. 

With regard to adult women, I think the ways that this can be equally narratively compelling and complex is that we outgrow these ideas–or don’t–at different points in our lives. The murkiness of these relationships only compounds itself as people pair off at different moments, or choose or not to continue to prioritize friendship in the face of marriage, family, work, etc. Again, because I’m sort of obsessed with this trying and failing to care for one another, I think I find this fumbling between allegiances and former versions of intimacy pretty endlessly fascinating (the book I’ve been circling now for months is about a group of grownup female artist/friends), especially with the added layer of time’s passing, other people and versions of one’s self muddying things up even more. 

AED: I think we agree that Lena Dunham did something extraordinary both with the character of Hannah Horvath and with the show. To my mind only Better Things and Curb Your Enthusiasm are on this level for recent shows. What is it about what she created that is so great, and why do you think there are so many haters?

LSS: This question is tricky because I think there is a simplistic (and not without grounds) answer that has to do with autobiography. Each of these makers is going deep and unrelentingly into a world, a psyche, and experience that feels close to their own. But, not only do I think that's a reductive read, I think it misses the ways that, actually, making art from life that isn't dull as shit, that is actually art, is incredibly difficult. In some ways, thinking about Pamela Adlon and Larry David here feels easier to me: these are people who have pretzeled themselves over years to make a living, brilliant artists who have learned and learned and made and made but always with whatever impediments that the market, bosses, collaborators, etc cast onto them as they worked. And then. Each somehow got freedom; whether that be through success or some random guy at FX or HBO greenlighting something maybe he didn't know that he was greenlighting, and then suddenly, all those years of wanting to just say the fucking thing comes out. Those shows don't work, to my mind, without all the years that came before this. All those years of still finding ways to make good work when the material was bad. It's Marguerite Duras writing that same story of being fourteen straight into her seventies; sharpening, sharpening, strengthening, until she finally got it right. There's something in both of those shows that feels like someone having acquired tools for years in order to finally get to enact them on the real true things they have to say about being alive. 

Dunham then is trickier because she's so young and didn't really have those same constraints. There's something messier about GIRLS in that way, but then, because it's a show about Girls, the mess feels part of what makes it great. She reminds me of Sheila Heti in terms of a willingness to fold whatever she might know about her flaws or foibles or not-knowing back into the story, to heighten and amplify them with an eye toward character (that is not the same, to my mind, as person in the world) to look right at it instead of to try to elide or cover over it somehow. And here it does feel worth naming the incredible way she came up and how that must have informed her ability to make so confidently out of the gate. To be raised in New York, by artists, to have always been told and shown that that had value, to have been told and shown that this was something to which one might devote one's life. To be honest, even typing that--as a kid raised...not that way--I cannot actually fathom what that might open one up to. 

I think the haters, as you say, are a combination of the ease with which Dunham seems to have entered this world, the almost inhuman sense of herself she seems to have in making the exact thing she wants to make, and also the fact that this ease and access isn’t available to most people who want to make things; without her resources, her access, the friends she has, maybe she makes this show on her own with her pals on her computer, but I’m not sure HBO gives her a deal before a pilot is even made. That said, very few people who get HBO pilots make shows that are this good. 

But I also think people get particularly prickly when they think a girl is talking too much about herself. And I do think it feels different when it’s women: I love Philip Roth. I love Knausgaard. I love lots of male (and female) writers who mine their lives, but something happens to the seriousness with which a story is approached when, not only is it about a woman, but she has the hubris to think her feelings are important, that they’re not just relevant but imperative to her thinking and her art making, when she has the gall to talk about herself. I, of course, don’t think this is what Dunham’s doing, nor is it what Roth or Knausgaard or Adlon or David is doing, but I think the impulse to reduce it down to that feels more intense when girls and women are involved. I always come back to Rachel Cusk here: she has been a genius a long time. She wrote some great early novels, and then she wrote about motherhood and divorce and she got destroyed. It was only once she wrote books so cold (and brilliant) that they no longer ran the risk of being muddied by too much mess or feeling that her status as essential and atom splitting was made indelible. 

In this vein, I'll admit here a self-consciousness, to which I'd love for you to respond: in both our substacks and our work, I turn it back to the self more often, and I find this endlessly embarrassing, but also I can't stop. I think, no matter how couched or not our stories are in construction, imagination, craft, other lives and times, etc, we only have our messy mushy insides to pull at. How do you think of that when you write and how do you think of that in terms of these shows? They are so actively in conversation with their own lives, and yet, I think the artistry lives in the same place all great art's artistry lives, which is some version of hard, complicated truth and also unrelenting formal precision, construction, and work? 

AED: Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that Hannah Horvath is far less Lena Dunham than Larry is Larry David or Pamela Adlon is Sam Fox. Perhaps that is because Dunham made the show when she was too young to have a sense of how to turn her Self into a persona, or perhaps it’s because she has a strong feel for fiction. When we see Lena Dunham on the About the Show clips she looks like a different person, one I assume is the real her, or the public real her—very pretty and fashionable, at ease with discussing her creation. Maybe Hannah Horvath is a Mr. Hyde, or an alter ego, I don’t know, but I take her to be a character, an astonishingly complex and wonderful character I never get tired of watching. What will Hannah do next? She barrels through life with such joie de vivre, as Principal Toby says of her. She’s often the most sensible person in the room, which makes for affecting comedy.

Lena Dunham had some connections and advantages but so do a lot of people and they don’t come up with a show like Girls. The talent is off the charts. Of course Jenni Konner and Judd Apatow are involved too, but I still think of it as Dunham’s show. I honestly don’t understand how she was so vilified, but I agree anytime a woman speaks loudly or out of turn there are repercussions. There just are. Who does she think she is to speak up and still be alive and well? It’s so tiresome, and I can’t imagine it will ever stop. If 50% of the species is suspect, hierarchies will continue to thrive, and a lot of people have a big stake in it being so.

How much of ourselves do we put into our work? I used to write semi-autobiographically but I finally found an imagination and have made up characters for my last novel and the one I am writing now. My sense of self is far less fixed than it used to be and if I set out to write something autobiographical I’d have to go back into the past and mine the set pieces that are my stories. Maybe I will do that someday. But that will still have to be in the context of making, not recounting or witnessing, which is a whole other thing. I mean, who cares about my actual life? Everyone has a life. What is so successful about Larry David and Pamela Adlon is their highly developed moral sense and how they apply that to slices of life. Hannah, Sam Fox, and Larry David as characters all have a quality that deeply appeals to me—they meet every person they come into contact with on an equal playing field. They don’t speak to children or old people or other races or abilities any differently than they speak to a demographic peer. This is so unusual and so thrilling. I find it deeply relaxing. Curb Your Enthusiasm probably has the widest range of casting of any show ever. Larry’s code, which is so strict and ridiculous, is also to the end of living in a civil society. He has a keen sense of how people should behave so the world can run smoothly. I think he is making a gigantic point about do unto others even as he is constantly having run ins and misunderstandings and fallings out. A true humanitarian who plays at being a misanthrope. Hannah Horvath isn’t misanthropic, nor is Sam Fox, but they also meet people where they are and take a careful look to see who exactly they are talking with. Sam Fox is the most present of any person I have ever seen, and Hannah might grow up to be like her. There are good signs of it.

Back to why the ire. Yes about Rachel Cusk. She refused to be destroyed by the naysayers who hated her memoirs, and refused to put herself in that hideously sexist line of fire again, so what to do? How about go back to the drawing board and come up with the idea of a persona who is talked at and to and only understood by what she hears being  said to her. The attacks are deflected because where is the target? She can’t be found anymore. Cusk is brilliant again. More brilliant than ever! She strikes me as being an intensely feminine writer, and this her most feminine move. Not unlike Joan Didion’s remove behind a cool persona. This self is present far more than I think it is in Lena Dunham’s creation, though Hannah Horvath shares some biographical notes with Lena (Oberlin, writing, New York.) Hannah is a character in the classic sense, an amalgamation of traits that can turn a plot, and so too for the rest of the girls.

LSS: I heard Percival Everett say in an interview I listened to yesterday, as I prepared to teach his novel Erasure in a couple of weeks, that the death knell for a movie, and the thing that gets so much contemporary fiction into trouble, is the phrase, "based on a true story." He said that immediately kills any opportunity the viewer or reader might have to allow the fiction to do the job of “making meaning” instead. (He said it better than this obviously, but that was the gist of it). The minute you say "based on a true story", the minute a reader decides a story is being told to show them the facts about an event or a human being, they tend to presume it's their job somehow to make judgments: she's awful! she's messy! she's a narcissist! Instead of to get inside of the story on its own terms. And that feels important to what we've been talking about here. Made up or not, identifiably pulled from life, or constructed whole cloth, our job has nothing to do with "based on a true story," but on building stories that readers and viewers might move through in order to encounter and make meaning through the process of being inside of what we built. 

And also, because you brought up James Wood in your first post–and because I adore him–here is Wood, talking about Henry James, in that same essay on character you brought up and that I’m also teaching next week: “James’s characters are not especially convincing as independently vivid authorial creations. But what makes them vivid is the force of James’s interest in them, his manner of pressing into their clay with his examining fingers: they are sights of human energy; they vibrate with James’s anxious concern for them.” 

AED: I love that quote too, and it is a great way of identifying what attracts me to a piece of fiction, and to what attracts me to writing too—that interest. I love to read through or past a text and picture the person writing it, their posture, their mood, and above all, their focus. I love to picture what I think their handwriting looks like. I realize that many theorists would be appalled by this way of reading, but I don’t want the text to only speak for itself. I like feeling in communion with the writer. That quality of being really interested in the characters created and seeking to portray them as they are in the world is so moving. We see so much of Hannah writing on Girls but I never picture that as how Lena Dunham writes. I don’t know. But I do feel that keen and benevolent interest in all the characters on the show. I also agree about “based on a true story.” Again, who cares? Does that give a story any more heft than great sentences and a deeply imagined structure do? It always comes down to the shape, the artistic treatment, the vision. Whether or not the girls are Dunham and her friends, the brilliance of girls has nothing to do with how true to life Dunham made them. Girls is a vision, and a profound one.