It’s very easy to walk down the street in New York and pass places that you think you’ve been to before, only to remember that you saw them in When Harry Met Sally or Home Alone 2. It’s not even uncommon to walk down the street in the West Village and wave to an old friend, only to realize that he’s not an old friend but rather Chris Noth who played Mr Big in Sex and the City.
Because of the way that New York is an imagined place as much as it is a real one, when I moved to Brooklyn three years ago, it was common for friends from the other cities I’d lived in – London, Berlin – to ask me if New York was just like they’d pictured it. Because I am a white female writer of a certain age – five years older than Lena Dunham, but an author of personal essays nonetheless - people invariably asked me: “Is it like Girls?” The answer: sometimes, maybe, kind of. Thankfully: not too much.
Girls came under fire by critics, professional and amateur alike, before many people had seen the first episodes that aired in the spring of 2012. Dunham and her co-stars – Jemima Kirke, Zosia Mamet and Allison Williams – were all the daughters of people who’d achieved significant money and success, boosted to fame in part by the privilege accorded to them by their upbringings. The show lacked characters who weren’t white. Dunham frequently appeared in a semi-nude state onscreen, despite the fact that her body was not that of a runway model.
It wasn’t entirely cool to like Girls among the people who I believed were erudite and whose approval I desired, at least not without disclaimers and apologies, insinuations that viewing was only conducted through a lens of disapproval and resentment. But in secret I watched the first season every week with a modicum of real enjoyment, firing up episodes on my ageing laptop in London. For though Girls took place in a city that I had only at that stage of my life imagined, its portrayal of post-college urban life for young white women rang true to me, which is to say: the heroines were making all kinds of bad decisions as they attempted to move forward with their unstructured post-education lives.
While I am sure there are a few people of this generation of middle-class, college-educated city-dwellers who executed their careers, love lives and friendships with nary a misstep in their early 20s, I also think they are in the minority. I watched Girls in those early years with a mixture of recognition and relief: recognition that I, too, had been a messy person in act and deed in my early 20s. I think some people disliked the show because they found the reflection of their worst selves confronting; I had to laugh. Relief that the stage of life in which I pursued men like Hannah Horvath’s indifferent and pretentious boyfriend Adam had passed. Unlike Sex and the City, which strived harder to present its four female New Yorkers as aspirational figures, the protagonists in Girls bore more resemblance to the foursome in Seinfeld, which is to say: they were jerks. What motivated much of the subtext of the negative reviews of Girls was that young women are not supposed to be selfish and unkind, and if they are, they’re certainly not supposed to revel in it.
Five years later, the Girls are women, with their last season debuting on Sunday, and I’m less interested in the show than I once was. In part, this is because I now have my own life in Brooklyn to contend with, instead of desiring an imagined one: there’s less escapism in the show now that I can drink coffee in the cafes where the characters spend their time. In part my interest has waned because the lives of the characters have followed the arcs of most twentysomethings: with thirtyishness comes less chaos, more predictability, and the realization that the things and relationships that feel most compelling and acute when you’re in your early 20s are not as important as you once believed them to be. It’s just not as entertaining.
In the last couple of seasons of Girls, the characters have shown signs of following the inevitable drumbeat of middle-class white Brooklyn life, which is to say the eventual priced-out move to New Jersey or Long Island or Westchester, where “when we lived in New York” will forever after be referenced with wistfulness at backyard barbeques, after which folks will discuss the price of the charcoal. I’m glad that Girls is being sunsetted because I don’t want to watch these avatars of our generation as they slide to the suburbs. I’d rather remember them as I’d like to remember myself and my friends when we were in our early 20s: young and stupid, sometimes unkind. Oh, and often hilarious.
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