I have a lot of gripes regarding my Instagram algorithm, but it certainly did its job on Tuesday evening, delivering the news that Lena Dunham is bringing back Girls for five new episodes straight to the top of my feed.
Like pretty much everyone else I know who was born in the mid-’80s, I love Girls. I loved it when it came out, I love it now, and there is truly no show on earth I’d rather see rebooted. When it debuted, I too was a 20-something trying my best to be a writer, living with one of my best female friends in a city whose rents outstripped my income, and working out how to pass as a real adult in a post-recession landscape. I too wore completely the wrong things to job interviews, and had friendships that were more dramatic than my romantic relationships. When the girls made catastrophic errors of judgement, it made me feel better about my own, and their perfectly-pitched combination of narcissism and misguided optimism made them endearingly familiar. Nobody wants to admit that they’re a Marnie, but we all are, to some extent, and the sooner we accept it the better. These characters screw up constantly, but it’s ok: they’re just girls.
Right at the end of the five-way FaceTime that announced the show’s reboot – in which Dunham asks Allison Williams (Marnie), Zosia Mamet (Shoshanna), Jemima Kirke (Jessa) and Andrew Rannells (Elijah) if they’re willing to reunite for another round – she asks the assembled cast a question: “Seriously, can we still call it Girls? Cause we’re like old as f–”. It’s pitched as a joke, but Dunham has a point. Nobody expects 20-somethings to have everything worked out. But at 40?
Dunham turned 40 in May, and I’ll hit that same milestone next month. It’s a baffling age: I am a mother to two children, and yet I still had the immediate urge to call my own dad when I reversed into someone’s car in a multi-storey recently. I remember when my parents turned 40 – reaching that advanced age felt impossible to imagine. But if any youthful readers imagine they will have everything “sorted out” by 40, then allow me to disabuse you of that notion right now. Perhaps I have more awareness now of when I’m making a mistake, but I still go ahead and make it.
As Dunham said in a Substack that went out right after the announcement: “We are not, strictly speaking, girls anymore. We couldn’t be called precocious, coquettish or fawn-like.” And she’s right: we can no longer lean on youthful naïveté to explain away our missteps or bad behaviour, and rather than relying on our parents for help, many of us are parents ourselves. Whilst Girls explored the strange and specific transition women go through as they enter adulthood, us 40-year-olds are already entrenched in it. We’re not girls, we’re women. In fact, as Dunham chillingly reminds us: “We are older than notorious literary spinsters Bridget Jones, Miss Havisham and Blanche DuBois.”
But as she also writes, there is no one way to be 40. “You can live with roommates and get drunk every night, or you can be a parent of four keeping a bustling household in check. You can proudly sleep around, or be in perimenopause and never want to be touched again… It’s an age that sounds so theoretical for so long, so far in the future, that when you’re younger you imagine you might be an astronaut by that time, or a benevolent billionaire, or not alive at all.”
On paper, I am where I would have expected to be at 40. I am married with two small children, I co-own a home, and I have a job that I enjoy and am good at. I’ve endured my fair share of curveballs in my career, as a parent, and in life in general. But I still feel like a child, playing an extended game of “grown-ups”. Some of my friends are getting divorces, others care for elderly parents, some have emigrated for a change of pace. Many of us have had to undergo career pivots in order to navigate parenting and childcare, and some have left corporate jobs to start acupuncture clinics, breweries or yoga studios. Barely anyone’s life looks exactly how they thought it would – some of the friends who were especially chaotic at 20 are now the ones in the most conventional set-ups, and vice versa.
I cannot wait to see how the titular girls have fared in the decade or so since season six. Hannah’s son will presumably be nearing his teens, and statistically it’s likely that at least two of the others would have had children too. I want to know if Marnie is still “taking a risk and putting herself out their creatively”, and if Shosh has resumed speaking to the other girls. I hope to find Elijah at the peak of his Broadway career, and Jessa still sober. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that even if someone’s life appears to be a certain way from the outside, the truth is rarely so neat. Now that Dunham is a parent, I hope to see some of the total headfuckery that comes with that played out on screen, as well as the heavy weight of expectation around ageing and body image that all of us are subjected to.
But most of all, I am just looking forward to seeing the girls again. Like the university friends I don’t see as often as I’d like but who remain like sisters to me, I grew up with these women. And whatever they’ve done and however they’ve messed up, seeing them again will always feel like home.