This week, I turn 43. I’ve made it past the “turning 40” panic and landed somewhere much stranger: a decade with no rules, no uniform and a group chat that swings between HRT dosages and Hinge horror stories in a single scroll.
So when Lena Dunham announced yesterday that Girls is coming back, I was excited.
But I also had a question. What on earth does Hannah Horvath’s life look like now? And, more pointedly, how much is it going to look like mine?
Girls was never just a TV show for millennial women. It was the mirror we squinted into through our 20s, half-flattered and half-mortified.
Watch: Has Lena Dunham won at life? Post continues after video.
Has Lena Dunham won at life? | Mamamia Out Loud
So the question of what those four women look like at 40 is really the question of what any of us look like at 40.
More than a decade on, I’m not sure anyone has the answer. That includes, refreshingly, Dunham herself.
A voice of a generation, now on the brink of 40.
Let’s rewind. In the very first episode, Hannah, high on opium tea and low on cash, told her parents she might be “the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice. Of a generation.” Then she promptly passed out.
The show that followed captured the chaotic, raw, gloriously self-absorbed reality of early adulthood in New York.
It had unpaid internships, awkward sex, suffocating codependency, tiny thrifted slip dresses and four friends buckling under the unbearable weight of their own potential.
Now Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and Shoshanna are standing at the threshold of their 40s. Dunham turned 40 herself this year, and she seems to have arrived with as many questions as the rest of us.
When she first pitched Girls, she wrote on her Substack, she was 23 and “living in the back of my parents’ place in a bedroom I shared with my 17 year old sibling.”
She assumed, “in the way 23 year olds often think things”, that she’d reached “the last transitional age.”
Reader, she had not. None of us had.
“But 40 is its own kind of weird,” she wrote.
There are so many ways to be 40.
Dunham’s list of what 40 can look like reads like a scroll through my own group chat. You can live with roommates and get drunk every night, or run a household with four kids. You can “proudly sleep around, or be in perimenopause and never want to be touched again.”
You can be stuck in a marriage crisis, convinced you’re too old to leave, or switching careers for the ninth time. Your 40th might be at a vineyard or a rave. Your parents might be ailing or, in her dad’s case, “lifting kettlebells”. Your kids might be heading off to uni, or “not yet born”.
Then came the part that stung.
“It’s an age that sounds so theoretical for so long, so far in the future, that when you’re younger you imagine you might be an astronaut by that time, or a benevolent billionaire, or not alive at all,” she wrote.
“And then you arrive, having met certain milestones you set for yourself and neglected others, only to look around and find yourself the last holdout.”
“We are older than notorious literary spinsters Bridget Jones, Miss Havisham and Blanche DuBois.”
Let that sit for a moment. Bridget Jones was in her early 30s, and we treated her love life like an international emergency.
The playbook didn’t get updated. It got shredded.
That’s the nerve Dunham hit. Life in your 40s no longer has one answer.
The white picket fence came true for some of us. For others, it went up in flames in the family court.
Some of us are enduring painful rounds of IVF. Some of us are raising teenagers, confiscating their vapes while quietly hiding our own in the glovebox.
There’s a meme that does the rounds in our group chats. It’s a still of Steve Martin and Diane Keaton in Father of the Bride. George Banks is supposed to be 45. He and Nina look like cardigan-wearing suburban relics from another century.
Father of the Bride’s idea of 45. Image: Dad Talk Today.
That was the picture of 40-something life we grew up with: a mortgage, a cardigan and a firm 9pm bedtime. Now we’re here, and it looks nothing like us.
Nobody I know has the cardigan, half of us have swapped the mortgage for a rental and a Hinge profile, and the 9pm bedtime only happens when the perimenopause insomnia allows it.
Some friends are happily on their second marriages. Some have sworn off men entirely. Others are single mums juggling everything, or single and fiercely, happily child-free. Some are navigating toddler tantrums. Others are white-knuckling driving lessons.
We’re living through a profoundly transitional era, often several times over in a single life.
Greece, then the living room floor.
I got married in my 20s and spent my 30s in the trenches of nappies, sleep regressions and sticky fingers. Now in my 40s, I am divorced and single.
My kids are teens and tweens. I’ve quietly crossed over from my “sun era” of parenting, when you are the absolute centre of their universe and every need runs through you, to my “moon era”.
These days I’m a distant, steady light. I watch them navigate their own orbit and hope the glow is enough to guide them home.
Earlier this year, I went to Greece with a group of single friends, no kids in tow, and danced under a Mediterranean sky feeling genuinely 25 again.
25 again, briefly. Image: Supplied.
Then reality intervened.
A few weeks ago, “I had a fall”. It didn’t happen on some daring Greek adventure. I got into a physical battle with the floor while standing up from the couch, and I lost.
The result was a full-blown concussion and whiplash I’m still nursing. You might feel 25 in your head, but your body will hand out humbling reminders that the warranty has expired.
Yep. Full-blown concussion. Image: Supplied.
My cycle and hormones are currently more chaotic than they were at 16.
And yet, despite the hormonal roulette and the baffling injuries, there’s something genuinely liberating about this age.
The greatest gift of your 40s is the death of people-pleasing. That chronic, exhausting need to be liked, to fit the mould, to apologise for taking up space, simply burns off.
In its place, you get more room for ambition, more clarity about work and more freedom.
So what does a 40-something woman look like in 2026? Whatever she chooses. There’s no blueprint, no shared finish line and no standard uniform.
Midlife is finally getting the rebrand it was overdue for. Watching Hannah and the Greenpoint crew stumble through the strange, messy, glorious reality of it might be exactly the mirror we need. Again.
Feature image: Supplied.