Does Hannah Horvath, heroine of the HBO series “Girls,” stand to learn any lessons from Elizabeth Wurtzel’s January 6th New York magazine story “Elizabeth Wurtzel Confronts Her One-Night Stand of a Life”? It’s almost absurdly perfect that the article appeared just days before the start of “Girls”’s second season. You can imagine Hannah, the emotionally raw, often exhibitionist alter ego of the show’s creator, Lena Dunham, hunched over her iPhone, devouring the article bit by tiny bit before accosting her friends with a round of unanswerable, existential questions: “Is this me in twenty years? Will I have ‘failed to accumulate that brocade of civility and padlock of security … that makes life complete’? Will I be able to write about this for New York magazine? If so, where do I sign up?”
Wurtzel’s fifty-five-hundred-word essay is many things: a real-estate horror story, a jeremiad against aging, a list of reasons to go to law school, a list of reasons not to go to law school, a paean to the good old days of generous book and magazine writing contracts. It’s also self-aggrandizing, disjointed, and, in its most egregious moments, leaves the impression that her editors might have been egging her on—or worse, taking advantage of what sometimes looks like a fairly precarious psychological state—in order to ensure maximum blogospheric outrage. “For a while after my first book came out,” Wurtzel writes, “I went home with a different man every night and did heroin every day—which shows my good sense, because the rest of the time I was completely out of control.”
In this story, as with many tragic New York City stories, the catalyst for reflection is a housing crisis. Stalked and terrorized by her landlady, Wurtzel is forced to move from the parlor unit of an elegant Bleecker Street townhouse to a basement apartment in Chelsea (east of Eighth Avenue, “the neighborhood equivalent of a dungeon.”) Compelled, finally, to take an inventory of her last two decades, she admits that, at forty-four, she is essentially living the same life she did at twenty-four. In the plus column, that means an active romantic life—“I am always in love—or else I am getting over the last person or getting started with the next one”—and fitting into the same clothes she always did. In the minus column, that means she can’t afford new clothes, anyway.
Wurtzel is the author of the best-selling 1994 memoir “Prozac Nation,” a book that became a cultural touchstone and earned Wurtzel a reputation as a kind of damaged, if gifted, wastrel-about-town. For aspiring writers kicking around New York City in the nineteen-nineties—I was one—Wurtzel was an object of scorn, admiration, lust, mockery, awe, and, most of all, envy. (I remember being very proud of my twenty-four-year-old self for coining the phrase “prosaic notion.”) We resented her for being such a famous and hot little mess, yet we couldn’t help but begrudgingly admire her ability to parlay her neuroses into financial rewards and a place in the literary scene. We rolled our eyes at her second book, “Bitch,” a treatise on sexually manipulative women for which Wurtzel had received an enormous advance and on whose dust jacket she appeared topless with her middle finger extended. Still, Wurtzel was a testament to the power of “the personal as professional,” and a lot of us wished we had the courage and chutzpah to make, as Wurtzel describes it, “a career out of my emotions.”
That is about as close a description as you can get to Hannah Horvath’s dream job. Hannah, an aspiring personal essayist who makes a pitch for staying on her parents’ bankroll because “I think I may be the voice of my generation—or at least a voice, of a generation,” is in some ways the poor man’s version of the younger Wurtzel. She’s not as glamorous, and despite a foray into cocaine in the season two opener, she’s not as reckless with controlled substances, nor have we seen any signs of the serious depression that has been Wurtzel’s calling card from the start. The two also represent markedly different generations and classes: Wurtzel, a child of divorce who grew up un-rich in New York City but was resourceful enough to get herself to private school and then to Harvard, comes out of a punk sensibility, and has a certain up-by-the-Doc-Marten-bootstraps street cred. Hannah, whose Midwestern academic parents balk at supporting her “groovy lifestyle” but can offer a safety net nonetheless, is softer, more naïve, and seemingly less adept than Wurtzel at wreaking havoc on either her own life or the lives of others.
Still, when it comes to the question of how to honor your creativity while also maintaining a semblance of respect for yourself, Wurtzel and Hannah are similarly flummoxed. Like Wurtzel, Hannah often confuses her entitlement for ambition, and passes off a certain baseline inertia for artistic integrity. When Wurtzel declares in her piece that she is “pleased that I only write what I feel like,” you can almost see Hannah copying that down and pinning it to a vision board. Like Wurtzel, Hannah has not yet learned that it’s possible (maybe preferable) to have a full-time day job and do your writing at night. She has not yet considered the various living options that exist outside the New York metro area. She does not understand the difference between being uncompromising in your work and refusing to make compromises so that you can keep doing that work.
The question is, will she ever learn these things? If so, how and when? Moreover, how must Wurtzel’s saga sound to someone like Hannah? How must it feel to be trapped inside a self-imposed, culturally sanctioned extended adolescence, only to get the news that this limbo might be a permanent condition, that not even fame and best-selling books guarantee a graduation into respectable, adult life? What would she make of being told, in effect, that the things that most move her as ideas and ways of being in the world—“pathological honesty,” “loving with a pure heart,” and “writing about uncompromised life in New York City,” to cite a few of Wurtzel’s top priorities—are the least likely to move her past the futon phase?
It’s possible that Hannah would cast the article off as the wreckage of one very specific train. It’s also possible that she would use it as further evidence that old forms of media are not only dead but were never all that great in the first place, and that she should aim to showcase her generation-defining voice in ways other than in book form. And though I think this one’s a long shot, there’s some chance that Hannah would be scared so straight by the article that she’d embrace her inner commercialism and lose the poserish coolness that takes up so much of her energy. Dunham’s role model, after all, was the hard working, highly accessible, confessional-but-only-to-a-point, consummate grownup Nora Ephron. Maybe Hannah would stop buying cupcakes and instead invest in some icing tubes and begin making them at home—and then write a romantic comedy about a pastry chef who falls for a gluten-free diet guru.
Like many people, women especially, who look back on their struggling, striving twenties with a combination of nostalgia and mortification, I think about Hannah a lot. (I think less often about Dunham herself, whose extraordinary talent and considerable luck renders her much less relatable than her fictional iteration.) I lived in my version of Hannah’s apartment and had my version of her pals and all those weird, feckless boyfriends. I, too, was homing in on the very niche practice of personal-essay writing, though I was far too broke to be discriminating about the work I did for money, which ran the gamut from temporary secretarial work to, as the dotcom era rolled around, “producing content” for a Web site about maxipads. Most of all, though, I, too, was constantly caught between wanting desperately to be a real grownup and wanting desperately to live in a way that felt, for lack of a better phrase, true to myself. I wanted—I needed—to know that I was precisely where I was meant to be, doing precisely what I was meant to do. This meant choosing freelance over staff jobs and renting in clanky, overpriced pre-war buildings rather than cheaper high-rises. It meant wiling away months and years with inappropriate boyfriends instead of with men I could imagine marrying. This all made for great fun and great writing fodder, but the price I paid was that I did not acquire many of the trappings of bona-fide adulthood. In my fantasy, the inappropriate boyfriends would come over and eat off my good china. But of course, I was nowhere close to being the kind of person who had good china.
I had a number of reactions while reading Wurtzel’s essay—this is sad, this is beautiful, what is the purpose of this paragraph?—but mostly I wanted to call up Hannah (or text her, or ping her, or whatever it is she answers to) and tell her to pay it no mind while also paying close attention. Over the years, countless stories have been told about winding up broke and alone in the big city, each with its own details and points of tension—I wrote one of my own, for this magazine, in 1999. (No two people get to that real-estate crisis in precisely the same way.) Still, to hear enough of these stories—there was Vince Passaro’s “Who’ll Stop The Drain?” in Harper’s, in 1998; there was Benjamin Anastas’s memoir “Too Good to be True,” just last year, to name a few—is to hear the same themes emerging again and again, and they’re not without their lessons.
“This story has the best possible ending, because I am telling it,” Wurtzel writes in “One-Night Stand.” Sometime in the course of writing my story, I thought the same thing. But then it came out, and even though life was exciting for five minutes, the money I was paid for it went straight to Visa and ConEdison and Sallie Mae, and I didn’t feel any more enlightened or empowered than I had before. I saw then, as I have so many times since, that stories don’t end just because you tell them. They may become funnier or more colorful or more meaningful because you’ve told them. They may make it easier to wake up every morning and keep living that story. But they don’t change it or make it a happy one. Change, unfortunately, can only be accomplished off the page. Change means enduring some measure of sameness while you build a foundation from which you can launch yourself into your next adventure. A pure heart beats as steadily and as monotonously as a sell-out one.
And with that, my dear Hannah, I say get a job and get writing, in that order. If you’re patient, one day you’ll have a life.
Meghan Daum is an opinion columnist at The Los Angeles Times. Her most recent book is “Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House.”
Photograph: HBO
