Lena Dunham's Reading List: Lena's Favorite Long Reads

The perfect list for vaca or just to read and read and read some more

I learned pretty much everything I know about adult life from magazines (and a lot I didn’t need to know at all.) As a kid, life seemed to unspool in the “glossies” on my parents’ coffee table. It was the hey-day of publishing glamour, and our house was single handedly keeping ‘em all in business- we had subscriptions to everything from Vogue to NY Mag, Allure to Mirabella, Art Forum to George.

*If you don’t remember George, it was the horny political monthly founded by JFK Jr. that gave us such essential cultural moments as this:

If you’re a Jack Schlossberg fan girlie, you owe it to yourself to dive deep.

(My mother also had a stash of vintage Playboys in her studio to use in collage work, and I’d wait for her back to be turned before I’d open the cabinet and marvel at topless women dressed like Swedish clog dancers or racy farmhands. My favorite was Clyda Rosen, who sadly doesn’t have a Wikipedia but does have a Boobpedia…)

Magazines are where I:

-realized that my freaky repetitive light switch flicking and obsessive prayers had a name and it was OCD (self-diagnosis for once led to real diagnosis!) The woman in the article felt compelled to rub a hand across any art in the museum that caught her eye, something I’d been tempted to do so many times as a child that I once activated an alarm at the Met. And this info was all in a copy of Elle at my mother’s hairstylist’s subterranean salon.

-was scared shitless by an expose claiming city kids were playing complex sexual games on the monkey bars in Tompkins Square Park, a sort of genital “pin the tail on the donkey” (to my knowledge, this rumor was the result of post-80s parental panic.)

-learned that oral sex does not mean talking ABOUT sex (my grandma’s subscription to Redbook was way pervier than anyone gave it credit for.)

-decided to trim my own Drew Barrymore baby bangs (an epic fail, thus wearing a bandanna for the rest of 7th grade.)

Drew did it better!

-I even stole a Marie Claire from my Godparents (themselves NY media luminaries, Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith) to read an article about a woman who WAS POLY! IN 1995, CAN YOU BELIEVE. When Roberta asked if I had taken the magazine to the other room, I told her that “the cat moved it.” (Feel free to use that.)

As I grew into a tween, I developed my own favorites- I used my allowance to subscribe to Sassy and Jane, the brain children of Jane Pratt, whose “make under” page is the kind of idea that strikes once every 76,000 years, sparking imitators but never equals. The fact that Google doesn’t throw up a cache of images of Carmen Electra having been stripped of her eye makeup in the monthly feature is cruel, so here- enjoy a favorite cover instead.

Hey now! This is what dreams are made of!

As for the below, did they ever find the cure for JBF?

It’s safe to say that the halcyon days of magazine publishing are behind us (if you don’t believe me, read Graydon Carter’s excellent memoir When The Going Was Good.)

Anna Wintour is still serving us pure glamouuur and keeping Conde right and tight, but no more expense accounts and caviar lunches. No more multi day photo shoots in St. Moritz with a devoted manicurist for each model (though I love when on set hair stylists tell me stories about the luxury vacations they took to fluff supermodel locks.) The internet has been broken so many times that it up and broke magazines. I pray for a renaissance- not just so that editors can dine in peace at the Odeon without fear of censure from the finance department but so that the kind of long form journalism that we once called art -and now call IP- continues to thrive.

I’m actually something of a magazine baby- until right around my birth, my father worked the night shift in the lay out department at Time (he crossed paths with colleagues like Frank Rich, Michiko Kakutani, Maureen Down and Graydon himself, though they’d likely only remember him as the Jesus-haired manboy with the office weed hookup.) My mother had a gig delivering the finished Time to the printer in Chicago on a red eye- she once forgot the magazine in her seat on the plane (I get stomach cramps just thinking about it.) What my father did with an X-acto and glue has long since been replaced by something digital, and what my mother once did is now called file sharing. But the collaborative nature of putting a magazine together, the voices and visions required to make it a must read, remains beautiful as ever.

And long form articles- the perfect late night confection, the ideal companion for morning tea. The feeling I get embarking on a really great piece is akin to finding 100 bucks in your recently washed jeans, or a stash of vapes when you already quit (and you must quit!)

Electric joy.

There are certain pieces I return to again and again- as much for their subject matter as for what they have to teach about storytelling. As a part time but passionate essayist, I’ve written countless pieces that attempted to add to the canon- but the GOATs have no imitators.

Below, a smattering of classic pieces that have- as the kids say- permanently altered my brain chemistry.

*RIP longform.org, which used to compile and celebrate. I miss you like a long lost relative.

James is a Girl, Jennifer Egan, 1996

This micro-portrait of James King (now the actress known as Jaime) navigating the New York modeling world as a teen is as glamorous as it is heart wrenching- a reminder that the days of extracting the labor of beauty from minors are not over, just more veiled. Jennifer Egan- a great novelist whose storytelling prowess makes itself apparent in this early work- is at her best here, nimble and non judgmental. James is a perfect heroine- funny, self-aware- yet unable to escape a spin cycle that demands she smile and say thank you for her own commodification.

Descent of a Woman, Rene Chun, 1996

Finding and reading this at age ten shook me so that I remember where I was- seated in front of the coffee table- and what I was eating- plain pasta, duh- and what I felt- a sense, for the first time, of the instability of the mind, the brittle contours of money and class, the reality that the city was full of many kinds of lives. We honor you Nadine Purdy, who got clean and opened a really lovely store.

The Challenge of Going Off Psychiatric Drugs, Rachel Aviv, 2019

When it comes to sensitive portraits that highlight the most complex realities we face, there is no one like Aviv. Subtle, kind, knowing, appropriately wielding her vast knowledge and appropriately avoiding moralizing. I could have picked any one of ten pieces from her, but I love this one as a person who has spent a long time attempting to wean off the teet of big pharma and to understand the role that medication should play in my life, instead of the role that it plays when medicalized thinking takes over.

*note: I am not recommending any of the moves or practices outlined in the article and suggest always speaking to a doctor when considering changing medication. Like, you must.

Ben and Dara Are In Love…… And Nothing Else Matters, Nancy Jo Sales, 2001

Nancy Jo- another queen. This captures New York at the turn of the millennium so intensely it makes me woozy.

Various, Mike Sager, 2020

Read any and all of Mike’s pieces on the porn industry- they’re tender, scandalous and funny. Thank you to Alissa Bennett for introducing me- my girl teaches me so much.

What Happened In Ed Bucks’s Apartment?, Jesse Barron, 2020

I’m lucky enough to call Jesse a dear friend, and to have been around as he meticulously reported this piece with the blockade of the early pandemic in his way. It’s a story about the ways in which whiteness and money can paper the cracks in a reputation so that we don’t see what’s right before us, and not a scandalous anomaly but a warning cry.

The Troll Slayer, Rebecca Mead, 2014

I read this piece- about Mary Beard’s quest not to hate but to understand the men who insisted on telling her she was unfit for broadcast- right when I needed it most. Rebecca profiled me early in my career and I loved watching her take notes so much that I probably let her follow me more places than I should have- such is her disarming gift, the gift the best journalists bring to the table.

A Hell of a Fade Out, Sam Kashner, 2006

This story- of the end of theater critic Kenneth Tynan’s life and a very specific moment in Los Angeles when the culture seemed to open up like a big fat flower- moves me endlessly. The devotion and understanding of his wife Kathleen has a romance that is rare, and Sam’s writing is always delicious.