Photo: Rob Latour/REX USA.We're practically counting down the days until Lena Dunham's highly anticipated memoir, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's 'Learned', hits shelves. On Monday, The New Yorker gave a sneak peek at the book with an essay from the author on "growing up, with help."
In the excerpt, titled "Difficult Girl," Dunham writes about her longtime struggle with irrational fears (including germophobia, hypochondria, and sexual anxiety), her eventual diagnosis with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the fateful beginning of her longtime friendship with Audrey Gelman (her BFF and the inspiration for Marnie on Girls) — who just so happened to be her therapist's daughter.
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The pair reconnected by chance at Oberlin College, 10 years after first meeting briefly in an elevator. Dunham writes:
"That Audrey and I wind up at college together is one of the strangest things that has happened, maybe ever, but definitely to me. On the surface, it makes perfect sense: two New York City girls with similar S.A.T. scores and similar authority problems being directed toward the same attainable liberal education by uncreative administrators. But spiritually I can’t believe it. After all these years of being separate, we are together.
We bond immediately, more over what we hate than what we love. We both hate lox. We both hate boys in cargo pants. We’re both sick of kids from Long Island saying they’re from New York. We spend the first few weeks of the school year riding our new red bicycles around town in impractical shoes and too much lipstick, unwilling to let go of the idea that city girls do it differently. We can barely hold in our peals of laughter when a boy named Zenith arrives at a party in a shirt that says 'P is for Playa.' We set our sights on senior boys who run ironic literary magazines and we try to avoid using the bathroom next to anybody but each other... We make up funny names for each other: Sqeedlydoo, Looty, Boober."
We can't tell what we're more obsessed with — the excerpt, or Dunham and Gelman's nicknames for each other. Sqeedlydoo + Looty = 4Ever. (The New Yorker)