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Somehow, no matter how hard life had gotten, making the show itself had always had a lightness, a joy. Now it was like a nightmare vacation, the kind that starts with food poisoning and ends with someone in jail framed for drug trafficking.

But the thing about standing for something? It’s very tempting, because it makes you feel important. And, as someone who has quit highly addictive drugs, I can tell you: Feeling important is even harder to kick.

I may not have been a person who met Oprah, but I was a person who almost met Oprah, and that was good enough for me.

Getting sick is no different than getting more famous. A maddening circularity, it’s very hard to explain, even to the people closest to you. When you’re sick, one medication causes side effects that must be treated by another, more drastic drug. If you’ve publicly fucked up before, you have to be careful all the time not to reignite a dormant story, to have past mistakes create future discomfort.

I sounded delusional and petulant, like someone who wanted to be able to have every version of my life happening in tandem, with no understanding of the immense privileges of the version I had. And that’s probably just what I was—after all, I was only twenty-seven.

But if I ever wanted a lesson in the way that a willful misperception can escalate and become a funhouse mirror for people’s sense of their own righteousness, for their unbridled rage, this was it. (I did not, by the way, really want the lesson.)

“There are no bad thoughts,” my father had always told me. “Only bad actions.” I extended his catchphrase to mean “There are no bad stories.” As Nora said: Everything is copy. If you had lived it, I thought, surely you could tell it. I believed in that desperately.

“Hey! How are you?” asked my old pal, auteur Noah Baumbach.
“Well, my cousin died,” I said cheerfully. “I actually have to leave after my award is announced. It’s very sad, but at the same time, he once brought a gun to Thanksgiving. These things happen.”

..but this was the first time it occurred to me that some people never come back. Sometimes, they run out of time.

The problem wasn’t just that I was burned-out. I was burned-out and too afraid to say it, as if admitting to the issue would be the confirmation everyone was waiting for that I wasn’t fit for the job. Looking back, I think the main person who had been waiting for that confirmation, fearing that reality, was me.

“There’s a lot to talk about in this show,” she said backstage. “I mean, anal sex in the first episode.”
“Do you mean sex from behind?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “Anal sex.”

I still think about this all the time—who told Barbara Walters that the only kind of sex you could have from behind was anal? What had her twenties looked like as a result?

We only get a certain amount of what we need in this life.

He told me he’d watched the first episode of Girls. “You’re like a modern Woody Allen, which is the nicest thing I can say to a person.”

“Isn’t it crazy that children come from literal fucking? Shouldn’t the two things be separate? Like, wouldn’t you rather your child come from a handshake and not an orgasm?”

“Never forget that I know you. I really fucking know you.” “What do you know?” I yelped. “You don’t go to parties. You love animals. And you hate being whispered about.” And he was right. (But then again, who likes being whispered about?)

Adam x Lena relationship is WILD

I knew that Hollywood was a place where you had to be able to compartmentalize your stress, work through the anxiety, and perform under profound pressure. But so far, every time things got too hot, well, it wasn’t that I left the kitchen—it was that I stood in a fugue state with my hand on the stove.

“FUCKING SAY SOMETHING” and hurled a chair at the wall next to me. “WAKE THE FUCK UP,” he told me. “I’M SICK OF WATCHING YOU JUST STARE.”

Adam Driver to Lena ….

Some indie film trivia for you: The last scene of Frances Ha was shot in my apartment in this building. Unlike in my life, it’s the place her character lands after all of her midtwenties wandering, not before.

✨💛

“I don’t know how you do it,” her friend said. “It’ll be a miracle if she can survive outside your home.”
To my mother’s credit, she didn’t take the bait: “I find her delightful,” she said, then offered casually, “and anyway, I’d have a real issue with how much sex your daughter is having.”

“Dunham,” he said casually, like we’d spoken yesterday. “Just thought I’d say hey.”
“Oh…I’m in California,” I whispered. “I’m in a man’s bed.”
“Do you like it there?” he asked.
“In California or in the man’s bed?”
“Both. Either.”

*a phone exchange between Adam Driver and Lena Dunham

And then, she asked me a question that haunts me to this day: “Would you like a Band-Aid for your butthole?”

💀💀💀

I felt, distinctly, like I was marching to the guillotine. Why hadn’t Marie Antoinette fainted on her way to the guillotine? (In fact, she had said, “Pardon me, sir, I did not do it on purpose” after stepping on her executioner’s foot.)

I was told to invite anyone I thought might have something valuable to say, but I could only think of my parents and Noah Baumbach, with whom I had enjoyed a single lunch. All of them declined, but Noah did call me the night before and say, “My only pitch is that you don’t have to listen to anyone.”

It seemed that the film industry was made up of people ignoring their basic human needs—sleep, time with loved ones, a reliable schedule, no domain over what they ate or where they went or when they peed. But who could blame them, when the trade-off was the chance to make magic, to play pretend for a job?

“..We’re the first generation that can’t reasonably expect more than our parents had. We all grew up on Ritalin and AOL Instant Messenger. We’re having sex fueled by the availability of porn, and we’re feminists who don’t know how to live our politics. I want to see my friends on TV.”

“Sex and the City was about being a woman in New York, already established and looking for love. But what about the phase before, when you don’t even know enough to even know what you’re looking for? The New York I know isn’t glamorous—we graduated during a recession..

“Nobody here just wants to be your friend.”

— the entirety of LA (and i guess ny)

When younger artists tell me about what seem like small triumphs—getting accepted to a festival, getting a note of encouragement from an artist they love—I always try and remind them to celebrate these early wins. Those first experiences of creative acceptance are unparalleled, because you don’t know enough to worry.

.. I’d demanded his number—my first agenda had been to kiss, but when that failed, collaboration seemed fine.

girl YES

.. it slapped me across the face: She was my muse. She had always been the person I aspired to behave like—part Lolita, part Keith Richards, with a healthy dose of indie sleaze and a haughty sense of manners about very specific things like being late.