Dunham’s hard lessons

Lena Dunham has had a brutal year, said Allison Davis in New

York magazine. Once celebrated as “a voice of a generation,” as her character on HBO’s Girls memorably put it, Dunham has been dismissed as a white, privileged celebrity by social justice activists and criticized by both the Right and Left for her provocative statements on race, sex, and politics. “Yeah, I’m not for everyone,” says Dunham, 32. She recently texted her ex-boyfriend to ask, “How does it feel to have dated someone everybody hates?” When Girls wrapped after six seasons, her relationships on set were “shabby at best” and “fractured at worst,” she says. “Maybe my fame made me impossible to be close to.” The daughter of “liberal provocateurs” in the New York art scene, Dunham used to shock for sport. Now she’s learning to bite her tongue on sensitive issues like #MeToo. “My voice,” she says, “isn’t needed.” Her personal life has been no less difficult; endometriosis caused her so much pain she elected to have her uterus removed. “It’s really amazing, in points of extreme distress, how things you thought were nonnegotiable start to become negotiable,” she says. “I thought I would do anything to have a kid naturally. Turned out that wasn’t true.”