HBO’s Girls is coming back, Lena Dunham and her fellow cast members announced this week, and the internet is already abuzz. Women of a certain age, myself included – approaching, turning or having turned 40 – are genuinely thrilled, if also slightly trepidatious. When you’ve loved, loathed and most importantly grown with characters in the way many of us did with Girls, you feel protective of a show’s legacy. But with Dunham, I’m confident it is in good hands.
Girls means a lot to me, in part because it was the topic of my first ever column for this newspaper: in 2012, shortly after the show premiered, it was already generating a bananas amount of internet discourse and I was on work experience. I was in my early 20s and not long off the dole. I didn’t share the privilege of Dunham’s characters, which is perhaps why I so enjoyed how she skewered it. (I never understood the criticism that the show was about spoilt rich girls. So many people missed the satire.) Yet there were aspects of it that I related to, as I wrote at the time:
“The experiences of Dunham’s characters, where they languish in unpaid jobs and have emotionless, awkward sex in grotty flats with pretentious males, resonate … with my experience and that of my friends.”
It’s not the finest piece of journalism I’ve ever produced (and my God, I would never make reference to my sex life in print these days), but I feel as though history has vindicated me. The series has aged spectacularly well, and in the past few years has been discovered and appreciated anew by younger women. There are popular rewatch podcasts; it’s been big on TikTok. Without all the surrounding noise that constituted 2010s Twitterstorm hell, the quality of the writing, direction and acting has been allowed to speak for itself.
What will Hannah, Jessa, Marnie and Shoshanna’s lives look like now they are more women than girls? When we left them, Hannah had just had a baby who would now be approaching tweenagehood. Will she have made it as “the voice of her generation”? Shoshanna had cut them all out of her life (in a prescient nod to the cult of going “no contact”) and was engaged to a man called Byron: will she be back in touch? Marnie was already divorced – Dunham has jokingly imagined she’d be on her third divorce by now – and Jessa was single in New York. How will we meet them again? And most importantly: will Elijah have become a Broadway star, and will he still have the bitchiest lines?
I can’t wait to find out because, as Dunham wrote in a post announcing the new series, there are so many ways to be 40: “You can live with roommates and get drunk every night, or you can be a parent of four keeping a bustling household in check. You can proudly sleep around, or be in perimenopause and never want to be touched again. I have friends who are in marriage crises but think they’re too old to move on, and still others switching careers for the ninth time.”
It’s true. Of the women I know and love, our lives all look quite different – from each other’s, and also from what we imagined in our 20s. Some marriages are imploding while others are just getting started. Some have tiny babies, some have teenagers and some are child-free. The sandwich years of caring for both offspring and elderly parents are beginning for some, while others don’t yet have those responsibilities. Some own huge houses and others are still renting. Many of us are grappling with our careers – whether that’s realising our ambitions and being given more power, or struggling with the juggle and paying the motherhood penalty (sometimes all of these at once). There are affairs. Perhaps most poignantly, there are the dreams that were never realised – and now may never be. There are the people we have loved and lost.
Dunham won’t be the first screenwriter to pay homage to this complicated stage of life, but she will be one of the first to be exactly of our generation, just as she was the first time around. It’s always cathartic to see art that speaks so directly to your experience, especially when it’s so, so funny.
Reading that first column, I cringe a little at my younger, wide-eyed self, but mostly I think about just how lost I was, how unsure of what my future would look like. That article helped convince my then editors that my perspective was worth sharing, that readers were interested in writing by young women. It still feels like an absurd stroke of luck and I’ll always be grateful to Dunham for saving me from the traditional nine to five. To quote Jessa: “You know what the weirdest part about having a job is? You have to be there every day. Even on the days you don’t feel like it.”
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Will this new, short run of episodes generate similar levels of controversy? I expect not. We have all grown up, examined the bruises left by those years and moved on. Girls is widely accepted to be one of the finest, funniest works about female experience that has ever been made for television. Will Dunham do for perimenopause, divorce, fertility issues, care work and postpartum what she did then for abortion, HPV, one-night stands and unpaid internships? I have a feeling she will, and I can’t wait.
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Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
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