Lena Dunham Is Entitled... To Your Affection The creator of Girls never claimed to have all the answers, but she has a few for Professor David Walker ’72. Photographs by Caroll Taveras lena dunham ’08, the creator of hbo’s girls, catapulted into public consciousness soon after the show—a frank look at the trials and tribulations of (a very particular segment of) her generation—began airing in 2012. The show follows main character Hannah Horvath, played by Dunham, and her three female friends as they fumble awkwardly toward adulthood, looking for jobs and relationships in a New York City that doesn’t yield them easily. “You couldn’t pay me to be 24 again,” a gynecologist tells Hannah, who is splayed in stirrups for an STD exam. “Well,” Hannah replies, “they’re not paying me at all.” Dunham began making films while at Oberlin, including a movie called Creative Nonfiction that she began writing as a winter-term project. That film screened at the buzzmaking South by Southwest (SXSW) Festival in Austin, Texas, a year after she graduated from Oberlin. In 2010, Tiny Furniture won the top narrative feature film award there. It caught the attention of Hollywood producer Judd Apatow, who contacted Dunham to talk about working together. That led to the television series Girls, for which Dunham has received rave reviews, a number of big awards, and a lot of criticism, mostly centered around the privileged positions of its main 20
characters. (The celebrity pedigree of the four women actors doesn’t help.) Dunham returned to campus in February for a conversation before a packed Finney Chapel with David Walker ’72, Oberlin professor of English and creative writing and Dunham’s former teacher, whom she cast as her character’s disapproving English professor in Creative Nonfiction. What follows are excerpts from that conversation. David Walker: Welcome back. Is it weird? Lena Dunham: You guys will experience this—maybe you already do: There are memories on every corner, and because of how small this town is, you make every part of it your own. So it’s really a beautiful thing to come back and feel all of those emotions again. It’s so funny that for me, three years of my life—I transferred here as a sophomore—could be so completely transformative, and informative, of the rest of my life. So far. DW: Most people know your work from Girls. But I would like to start by asking you a few questions about the journey from here to there. When you were at Oberlin, you started