Lena Dunham's Reading List: March 2025

Books for harlots (both active and aspiring)

Dear Reader(s)

It felt important that our first round of book recs have an organizing principal- much like when you're 21 and feel absolutely certain that if your birthday doesn't have an ironic theme then it may as well never have happened at all (mine was themed IMPORTANT BITCHES IN HISTORY, for example, while my sweet 16 required dressing as something that started with the letter L. I was Lolita, heart shaped glasses and Dum Dum lolli in hand. Take it up with my shrink...)

I thought long and hard about a group of books, both old and new, that tell a story- and after deep and prolonged consideration, it came into startling focus like a Magic Eye picture...

BOOKS FOR HARLOTS (BOTH ACTIVE AND ASPIRING)

The following books are for and about those who grab life by the balls... and boobs... and butts... And sometimes even the ears, but only to pull their paramour into the bathroom to hook the fuck UP.

But on a deeper level, these books ask essential questions about the sexual mores of the time in which they were written, what role desire plays in our daily lives, and whether a transcendent sexual experience really does have the power to relieve us of our earthly pain.

So, let's get busy...

Mating, Norman Rush, 1991

The first time I read this book, I felt like someone had taken all my naive college fantasies and fed them back to me as nightmares. I had questions about every aspect of human existence, except for one: yes, you can get horny reading opaque literature about sociology.

The story of a nameless anthropologist doing graduate work in Botswana who ends up in a polyamorous matriarchal village before that was a thing, Mating's title says it all.

In recent years, Mating has achieved something of a cult status (back in my day, this was one of those books you felt cool for knowing about and oddly protective of- so it’s the book equivalent of an indie band from your neighborhood whose music is suddenly in Hyundai Elantra ads.)

If Norman's work interests you, check out this lovely article about his long term collaboration with his wife- the rare male genius who DOES give his better half her flowers. Yes King.

What purpose did I serve in your life? Marie Calloway, 2013

Long before Scaachi Koul went hunting for Marie Calloway, (and, in the process, brilliantly re-examined the alt lit craze of the aughts) I was reading this book and thinking "some girls really know how to live."

Looking back, Marie Calloway wasn't having better sex than the rest of us- but she wasn't afraid to express desire, something I found far too vulnerable (I always chose to write about bags fumbled and kisses aborted, rather than to speak to desire- and so it was a dare I gave myself just a few years ago, to film some Good Sex.)

Calloway has since disappeared from the scene- but maybe she knew the truth about the internet and its fickle ways: it's better to burn out than to fade away.

Nothing Natural, Jenny Diski, 1986

1986 was a very important year: I caused my mother a lot of trouble in the breastfeeding department and Jenny Diski (the brilliant, cutting and prolific essayist, novelist and critic) had her novel Nothing Natural banned (side note: every woman worth knowing has a banned book- even Julianne Moore's children's book about freckles has been forbidden in schools run by the Department of Defense, which would be hilarious if it wasn't so fucking scary.)

Read in the harsh fluorescence of 2025, Nothing Natural doesn't start out all that shocking- a single mother gets spanked within an inch of her life by a not very hot guy she meets at a party, rather than stay in her kind but bloodless marriage. A pinch of Fifty Shades, a dollop of Little Children. The shittier this man acts, the more unable to control her desire she is. WHAT WOMAN IN BROOKLYN HATH NOT EXPERIENCED SUCH A GAME.

But the novel grows perverse in ways no one could anticipate, until it reaches a stunning crescendo that is terrifying but never simplistic, heartbreaking yet ice cold. I know that most of us were made from an act of sex, but wow, fornicating is not for the faint of heart.

Women, Chloe Caldwell, 2014

Hey friend. Are you gay? No? Well, that's about to change.

Sula, Toni Morrison, 1973

Even Nobel Prize winners love a loose woman. Sula Peace, the namesake/uneasy heroine of this novel, is the obsession of her small town as she makes her way through its stock of married men, having the kind of orgasms that make you think "wow, I am NOT doing this right."

Toni Morrison is never working on less than the levels, so this is a glimpse not only into the hopes and heartbreaks of a Black community across decades in a changing America, but also into the way that flouting the sexual manners of the moment lead to more conflict with the women watching than with the men participating. I read this book for the first time in 7th grade, and it’s stayed in rotation since. Sula is impossible to forget- for her more steadfast and constricted best friend Nel, for the men she loves and leaves, and ultimately for the reader.

Damage, Josephine Hart, 1991

I must have a thing for British people doing light S & M, but this book sends me- and I'm not the only one. Louis Malle made the film shortly after publication, and Netflix did a campy remake (retitled Obsession and replete with some of the most demented masked sex since the Oberlin College Halloween party I attended in 2005...) The story of an upstanding family man who embarks on an affair with his son's lover, I celebrate this book because the female romantic lead is ice fucking cold. Instead, the simp is the man who has exploded his life for a woman to whom love is but a game.