'Fessing up

Lena Dunham, Caro Claire Burke

I am no better than anyone else when it comes to ogling and gobbling up women’s pain. It’s not a nice habit. I could try and explain it away as a novelist’s essential curiosity - loads of writers are devoted Married at First Sight fans, a show which specialises in suspiciously large-lipped blondes curled up sobbing in the foetal position. In fact, I am such a fan, I even took a detour on my recent trip to Sydney to get a photo in the hopes that I’d run into some Ixpirts. (RIP, lovely Mel).

But I never do confessional writing myself, any more than I visit Goodreads. The UK tabloids are famous for paying women to bleed themselves out on its pages, to be further chewed up in the comments. I remember a friend who really needed the money at the time, up to her neck in dirty nappies, being offered thousands, literally thousands, to write an article entitled ‘Why I Wish I Hadn’t had Children’, an article that would have been googleable by her children and their friends for the rest of her life. She managed to turn it down, but she had family support and back up.

I love doing publicity, I am QUITE the show-off, but the one thing I won’t do is confessional journalism. Spilling your guts for other people to feed off does nobody any good, not really, and the machine is never, ever satisfied. Women who write regular columns, I think, particularly for the Mail, flay themselves halfway to death and madness, and end their days spraying a continuous fire hose of acidic spite on anyone handy- just ask Meghan Markle- and it is still never enough.

So I stayed away from the Lindy West hoo-ha around her new book Adult Braces . Lindy West is utterly brilliant. Her take down of Love Actually is one of the great pieces of comic writing of our time- ‘cockblocktopus!!!!!’, Shrill was superb. But now she’s known for talking about an awkward-sounding poly throuple thing she’s in (I am thirty solid years too old to know what a throuple is and whether it’s different from a poly something, and have literally no interest in finding out, although I respect good time-management skills in anyone), and getting roundly hammered for it.

West should be basking in her success of being that rarest of things, a successful funny woman, but no, here we are. Interestingly, both Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s autobiographies, Bossypants and Yes Please, respectively, are diverting enough- I love Poehler’s author photo in particular- but intensely guarded.

So to Lena Dunham, whose memoir Famesick, is out now. If I tell you it’s good, I had two eight hour flights to get home from Manila and I spent the entirety of them not watching the inflight entertainment at all*, just listening.

It is hard to remember now how hard she crashed the culture and how young she was when she did it. I didn’t like Girls at the time; I found them all intensely unlikeable and spoiled, not realising that of course that is the entire point. I have rewatched it since and recognise its brilliance, particularly that ridiculously incendiary performance by Adam Driver, whom she discovered, even though, as this book reveals, he was not at all nice to her.

The memoir, particularly the first half, is totally superb, and captures the precise moment, that absolute nexus of being the hot new young thing, the last time really that culture converged, before fragmenting into tiktoks and youtube; that 00s hangover of worshipping incredibly skinny bodies, the awful Heat/ Perez Hilton years of pointing out every single flaw AND the emergence of Twitter as a direct conduit to celebrity.

Dunham’s despairing nights trying to engage her trolls and placate her critics is just pure misery, particularly now we know how Twitter ended up. She was in the eye of the storm and it very nearly killed her; as she points out in the book’s dedication, it killed plenty of others.

I ended up wanting to apologise to her; I read all that stuff. I pride myself on not slowing down to ogle carcrashes, but I read it all. I still read Popbitch. I felt complicit, although perhaps not quite as complicit as those university creative courses that charge young and often vulnerable people thousands and thousands to learn how write their “memoirs”. It’s a raw and funny read and highly recommended.

Whilst away I also read Yesteryear, which a lot of my peers can’t manage yet, as it is such a tremendous idea - tradwife influencer goes back in time to live in the actual doing- everything- from-scratch days she’s pretending were wonderful- that every novelist I know including me is furious we didn’t think of it first.

It is a cracking concept, with some wonderfully furious writing on what is demanded of public-facing women, that doesn’t quite stick the landing. I suppose it might be because I have one foot in science fiction, but I hate over-explained gubbins.

If one is writing gubbins- we’re in space, or we’ve travelled in time- just accept that the reader is already invested and there for the ride: don’t try and go to endless lengths to justify it. ‘There’s a platform at King’s Cross station’ or ‘walk through this wardrobe’ or ‘Gregor Samsa found himself …transformed into a giant insect’ is completely fine, we are already holding the book in our hand. Trust your readers to have an imagination too.

But it is a very enjoyable and guilt-free read: pain and misery, happening to women who aren’t real.

love,

Jen. xxxx.

* Also they didn’t have much of my favourite genre. Because I lived in France for many years, I have a huge soft spot for absolutely terrible french romcoms, and it wasn’t a European airline, so they only had one- À Toute Allure, but it did live up to its tradition of being completely terrible. It’s about a man who falls in love with a woman who works on a nuclear submarine and stows away on it, and is absolutely nowhere near as good as that sounds. I adored it.