The HBO show Girls was not written for me.
But I did pay attention, especially as an educator and writer of cultural commentary. Because it was a show for the times as Millennials hit that fascinating stretch in life called the "twenty-somethings," -- and for the Echo-Boom kids the emergence of a weird sociological term called the quarter-life crisis -- I was intrigued enough to see how Lena Dunham's portrayal revealed the temperature and temperament of her generation the way shows like Sex in the City did for mine. And I did use some of the revelations in my writing for the next generation:
In the first episode of the HBO show “Girls,” Hannah is fired from her unpaid internship, only to learn her replacement is actually being paid for the job. When she adamantly confronts her boss, he says, “Well, she knows Photoshop.” While Hannah may tell herself, “I can learn Photoshop,” the reality is she didn’t. Thus, the point is to advise kids to be the kind of person who learns Photoshop. Hannah is a classic example of a person waiting for passion to lead her to happiness — and it never happens. Successful people, by contrast, are the ones who work hard and do what needs to be done to get what they want and need.So, I browsed with more than passing interest, Lena Dunham's new long-form New Yorker piece "Why I Broke Up with New York."
It didn’t take long for me to grow into possibly the least adaptable native the city had ever seen. All good New Yorkers know that to live in, and love, the city takes a certain amount of chutzpah—you have to be ready, at a moment’s notice, to push your way through the throngs, shout your coffee order, rush to nab the last subway seat or the only on-duty cab. You have to be unsurprised by the consistent surprises that come with a new day in New Amsterdam. And you have to love it all, even if you pretend you don’t. My parents had both been raised far enough outside the city to have childhoods that could be called idyllic, but close enough that Manhattan exerted a strong pull. Getting to New York was their ultimate expression of self-determination, the place where they would shed preconceptions about who they were meant to be and create a new life among artists and experimental thinkers, planting their seeds in the fecund soil of the city. If we are to continue with the plant metaphor, I was more like an avocado pit mashed into a cup of dirt by an excited third grader who then forgot to water it. I never actually sprouted.And, of course, readers of cultural commentary can't read Dunham's reflections without thinking of perhaps one of the greatest long-form essays on New York, the legendary Joan Didion's "Goodbye to All That."
Anyone who’s completed the climb out of their early twenties hopefully has the wits to remember when life was as vivid as Kodachrome and the experience to recognize that perhaps all those new colors were duller than they seemed. Perspective, after all, is one of the great pleasures of getting older. But at the date of her death Thursday at the age of 87, Joan Didion’s 1967 essay “Goodbye to All That” remains the permanent sunspot obscuring the center-vision of many maturing writers even contemplating leaving a place like New York and telling other people about it. Only a great artist creates and ruins a genre at the same time. For millennial writers who grew into the body of essays, novels and literary journalism Didion already had waiting for them, it was like sitting down to grainy footage of a party that ended long before they would ever arrive.
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