“Great Expectations,” by Chloe Malle, was originally published in the March 2012 issue of Vogue.
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I don’t want to freak you out,” warns Hannah Horvath, Lena Dunham’s character on the forthcoming HBO series Girls, “but I think that I may be the voice of my generation.” Hannah has just presented her parents with an excerpt from her book of essays, tentatively titled Midnight Snack, but in response to their incredulous silence amends her statement: “Or at least a voice of a generation.” A hapless intern at a boutique publishing house that refuses to hire her, Hannah is not yet the voice of any generation, but her creator, Dunham, might well be.
The 25-year-old, first noticed for her Web series, Delusional Downtown Divas, a self-referential caricature about three art-world offspring trying to gain their own fame, leapt into the cultural consciousness with her 2010 film Tiny Furniture, beloved by critics and audiences alike. The film brandished Dunham’s unique brand of mumblecore-meets-Larry David comedy, capturing the travails of a jobless liberal arts graduate who moves back into her family’s downtown loft—a satirized version of Dunham’s own life. (After graduating from Oberlin, she returned home to Tribeca to live with her teenage sister and artist parents, Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham.)
Girls, which Dunham also writes and directs, is similarly true-to-life, a comic yet painfully honest portrayal of a cadre of young women trying to find their way. “It’s about all the horrifying mistakes a group of young women make while they start their lives in New York,” says executive producer Judd Apatow, who became a Dunham mentor after loving Tiny Furniture. The foursome includes Jessa, an itinerant citizen of the world played by Jemima Kirke, a painter who costarred in Tiny Furniture and was roped into doing the show through her friendship with Dunham—“she’s one of the few people who have to be convinced to be on an HBO show,” says Dunham slyly; Marnie, a Chelsea gallery girl and Hannah’s roommate, played by Allison Williams (a fledgling actress and singer, and the daughter of NBC’s Brian); and Shoshanna, Jessa’s Juicy jumpsuit-clad cousin, brilliantly enacted by Zosia Mamet, known for her roles in The Kids Are All Right and as Peggy Olson’s lesbian admirer on Mad Men.
While Girls tracks a quartet of young women confronting single life in the city, the likenesses to Sex and the City end there, though that hasn’t stopped critics and Internet rumormongers from comparing the two. “It’s the life that girls who grew up watching Sex and the City thought they would have in New York,” explains Dunham, whose characters present a comical mix of entitlement and insecurity. “When I was thinking about creating the show, I thought about My So-Called Life if Gilda Radner was on it.” And while Carrie Bradshaw sashayed down her uptown Manhattan hallway-cum-closet in boys’ briefs, Manolo Blahnik mules, and an effortless six-pack, Hannah Horvath sits naked in her Greenpoint, Brooklyn, bathtub eating a cupcake, a soft wobble of upper arm hanging over the tub and a turquoise mess of tattoos (illustrations from children’s books) crocheted across her back. “She’s very brave and not concerned about embarrassing herself in any way,” Apatow says of Dunham. “I think because her parents are artists she does it quite naturally. She’s grown up around so much creating, she just thinks that’s what you do, like eating or sleeping.”
Dunham’s ability to be both awkward and endearing makes her an unlikely heroine but one who is refreshingly real. Girls taps into the Zeitgeist with rawness and irreverence, from Hannah’s earnest Google searches—“stuff that gets up around the sides of condoms”—to Marnie’s hierarchy of communication with a boyfriend: “the totem of chat…the lowest, that would be Facebook, followed by G-chat, then texting, then e-mail, then phone.” (Face-to-face is ideal but “is not of this time.”) “These are the girls who live in the apartment across the hall from you that you’ve never talked to but you’ve observed,” says Williams. However, your neighbors across the hall aren’t awaited with the same anticipation and eagerness as these Girls. “Hype is always a terrible word unless it’s used in a rap song,” Dunham says of the buildup surrounding the series, which debuts on April 15, “but I think that when you’re really excited about what you’ve made, it helps the situation.”