I was wrong about the Girls creator.

In April 2012, when HBO debuted the first season of a half-hour satire of the lives of young women in New York, I took it rather personally. I was myself in my 20s, and although I had moved to Brooklyn only eight months prior, I was “going to be” a New Yorker too. There was something in the air that spring that made my future feel hopeful. Then, in my personal field of vision, Girls landed like a lightning bolt—a dramatic strike, seemingly out of nowhere, that suddenly became the only thing anyone could talk about.

I didn’t know the previous work of creator Lena Dunham, although I sought out her SXSW debut Tiny Furniture—an unforgettable, repulsive film that discomfited me—later that year, watching it on a MacBook screen balanced on my lap. But the SXSW debut, however buzzy, could not compare to the massive marketing rollout that HBO put into Girls. Dunham’s face, along with those of co-stars Jemima Kirke, Allison Williams, and Zosia Mamet, was plastered on buses, inside subway stations, on billboards in Times Square. The promotional clip for the show included the drily funny scene in the pilot when Hannah, arrogant and high, brags that she is “the voice of a generation.” (In the actual episode, she follows that up, a little lamely, with “Or, at least, I’m a voice, of a generation.”)

That line remains lodged under my skin. The debut of Girls could have spoken to the shared experience I had with Hannah Horvath and her 25-year-old creator, but instead it ignited within me something contrarian and defensive, fueling an ugly, self-righteous indignation. As a culture critic, I had the perfect avenue to voice my feelings, starting with a scathing piece I wrote for a now-defunct website that is lost to the internet archive. My ire didn’t stop there—in 2014, I called the show “anger-provoking,” writing, “Girls has proven so tone-deaf on issues of diversity and inclusion that it’s operating in a deluded vacuum.” In 2016, after a particularly “tiresome” episode that was “supposed to be funny,” I quipped: “That hint of spring in the air isn’t just longer days and sudden cloudbursts; it’s that unmistakable feeling, on Sunday nights, when Girls does something purposefully infuriating, and then waits for the think-piece cleanup crew to put in time on Monday.” I questioned if Girls was “a five-season-long gambit for attention.” And later, one of my headlines asked: “Is Lena Dunham torturing her characters or us?”

Dunham became a punching bag in the public eye, someone to scoff at and dismiss as a self-centered, entitled, overrated millennial white woman.]

This was the 2010s. Getting worked up on social media about something that doesn’t really matter was kind of a rite of passage. And it’s not as if Dunham herself didn’t court the attention of the press—in the midst of her HBO series’ stranglehold on pop culture until its conclusion in 2017, she also wrote a memoir, maintained a newsletter, and was very active on social media, creating several vectors for her words to be published and then obsessively scrutinized. With all this material, she has said some things that many find unforgivable, be it her candid discussion of exploring her younger sibling’s body, her mystifying statement in support of Girls producer and accused rapist Murray Miller (which she later apologized for, and which, in her new memoir Famesick, she alleges she has no memory of writing), and some extremely odd descriptions of football player Odell Beckham Jr. in a newsletter conversation between her and comedian Amy Schumer. There’s no doubt that Dunham courts attention; she’s often admitted as much herself.

But as the years have gone on and Dunham has retreated from the spotlight, I have felt more and more that I whiffed that moment in history when her TV show first popped up on my radar. There was something very intentional to Girls, something that spoke to me. I could’ve connected with it. Instead, I rejected it dramatically. I wasn’t the only one. Dunham, for reasons both valid and, in much greater proportion, not, became a punching bag in the public eye, someone to scoff at and dismiss as a self-centered, entitled, overrated millennial white woman.

It was only with the clarity of time and hindsight that I, like so many others who once derided Dunham and all that she supposedly represented, was able to look back and question what I did 14 years ago. I was constrained by my limited idea of who I—and who Dunham—was, once upon a time. Now, as Dunham reemerges to reclaim her space in the public eye, I can finally say it: I was wrong about Lena Dunham.

Some might ask what the big deal is. So I was, in my capacity as a TV critic, mean about a television show—at least I wasn’t a Sandy Hook truther or a COVID denialist, a rabid partisan MAGA-head or a blue-wave #Resister, a reply-guy mansplainer or a profane, gruesome troll. But I feel that I let myself down, attacking something that hit too close to home instead of letting myself absorb it, letting it change me, as art does. Plus, I was courting drama for my own gratification, comparing my own successes to Dunham’s to fuel my sense of injury. I could say I was using social media to express my feelings, but increasingly I feel that social media uses us: The algorithms privilege glib readings and outsized emotions, both of which I was guilty of.

Self-loathing is a double-edged sword, one that cuts through any hope of solidarity with others like you as it slices your skin to ribbons.

I couched my personal frustrations as cultural criticism. When others lambasted Girls’ lack of diversity, I latched on in agreement, convinced that this explained why I, a South Asian woman, felt so diminished by the show. Those critiques have merit, but in hindsight, I was using them for personal ends. My own self-loathing was noisily activated by Dunham’s candor, courage, and evident success. I was invested in tearing down a fat, wordy, sensitive woman because I was all those things but I hadn’t been as successful as Dunham. Because she was herself so vulnerable in Girls—and because, despite our differences, she was also young, wordy, living in Brooklyn, and nothing like the curvily slender physical ideal for women—the cudgel with which I punished myself could easily be turned on her.

This is quite ugly, to be invested in punishing someone for their art. And it’s made worse because of the blurry continuum between “bad-faith” and “good-faith” critiques, one that I’ve seen replicated many times on political topics. Pundits use big words and trolls use slurs, but they often work in tandem against the same subject. Insults give heft to the columnists’ prose, while intellectual arguments offer a veneer of justification to the name-callers. This is, to my mind, the worst outcome of my behavior. By participating in the moment of reaction, I offered some tacit approval to the worst voices trying to tear Dunham down for reasons completely unjustifiable—voices that argued that a woman over a certain size shouldn’t be a sexual being on television, or a sexual being at all; voices that formed a kind of base, free-floating hatred that had seized on Dunham from the moment she emerged on the scene. Needless to say, these are voices that could have hated me in the very same way.

That’s the most mysterious element to this episode in my past: Why didn’t I simply get it? How could I not see that, despite some differences, Dunham and I had much more in common than not? Especially when it comes to the question of showcasing women on-screen who offer more than one idea of what it’s like to be beautiful, to be worthy, to be lovable. I can’t quite explain it, except that self-loathing is a double-edged sword, one that cuts through any hope of solidarity with others like you as it slices your skin to ribbons.

Now, it is fair to say that I wasn’t the only person driven a little out of their mind by the debut of Girls. Perhaps we were all jealous, but I do think there’s a little more to it. I feel that Girls was an essential vector transforming our generation’s youthful idealism into something meaner and more cynical. The premiere of that show took in all the components of millennial optimism and spit out a storm of discourse about invisible levers of power and esoteric levels of access.

To be sure, it was hardly Dunham’s fault that HBO doesn’t go around giving shows to anyone who asks; at the same time, of course she benefited from her connections professional and personal. I wonder if the premiere of the series did not serve as a generational corrective, a millennial reality check. Girls showcased our neuroses and also the inexorable structure we remained stuck in. As a result, the show was marketed in a way that created a huge splash, but that splash came at the expense of a slightly more levelheaded discussion. Social media connected us—all so that we could yell at each other. Dunham’s characters exhibited incredible vulnerability, and the response they met was by and large very harsh.

If I am generous with my younger self, I can understand why the pilot rocked me. It is a display of an incredible, almost wunderkind talent—sharp, witty, detailed, and humane. Its characters are so solipsistic it’s almost as if they’re walking around New York City in a bubble. It’s hard to tell if the characters know how ridiculous or awful they sound when they speak—indeed, the satire is so twisted it kind of sailed over my head at first.

And most importantly, there is an unstable, thorny tension present in the show, one that seems to repel and attract the viewer in equal measure. It arises out of the difficulty, so to speak, of Dunham’s on-screen presence. She’s not formed in the mold of most TV starlets, and her body—textually and subtextually—is framed as a problem. It’s soft where it’s “supposed” to be hard, big where it’s “supposed” to be small. For better or for worse, the show is preoccupied with the contrast between what Hannah’s body “should” be and what it is.

It’s strange to talk about Dunham’s body, in her 20s, in this manner. She is perfectly lovely. There is this mass delusion that this woman is fat in this show, and, looking back on Girls, I feel sad for the poverty of our collective vision then. She’s literally normal, and yet, because she is not as hot and hourglass-shaped as a porn star, she’s suffused with self-loathing.

Dunham’s performance as Hannah piles on the tension: She is, at times, grating, clueless, and self-obsessed. In 2016 she would describe this as her “delusional girl persona.” It’s a girl we love to hate, and in a way, Dunham is both the target of this hatred and a participant in the attack. Dunham has her own disgust for Hannah, and it mingles with the audience’s revulsion. The combination is potent, a state of unresolved awkwardness that was all the rage in the millennial humor of the moment.

I didn’t know this in 2012, but being expertly discomfited is often the mark of a skillful artist. What I recognize now is how Dunham approached this discomfiture of bodies, visuals, and spaces from so many angles in Girls—as a director, writer, producer, and actor. If we look back at the history of visual art, it’s so often depictions of women that shock and thrill the world stage when they first appear, before becoming so well known that they turn into our notions of traditional or classical beauty. The Mona Lisa’s ambiguity was threatening, once; so was the hint of underarm hair on Eugène Delacroix’s partially nude female Liberty, who waves a French flag as she leads the people in rebellion. Perhaps it’s the extra vertebrae in the spine of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ nude Grande Odalisque, or the strap daring to slip off the shoulder of John Singer Sargent’s Madame X, but in all of these works, it’s the female figure’s engagement with the viewer’s gaze that is why we remember them.

As I look back on Girls now, my main takeaway is the courage it required to embody this character on-screen. We have come to take it for granted that anyone in Hollywood daring to challenge its norms—whether it’s a princess who happens to be Black or a superhero who happens to be gay—will be subject to vile language from the gutters of the internet. Maybe, to Dunham’s detriment, she expected a bit better from us.

The first season of Girls ends in a beautiful way. After an emotional argument with her boyfriend Adam (Adam Driver) at Jessa’s surprise wedding, Hannah falls asleep on the F train. She wakes up at the end of the line. The sun is up. Her purse is gone. Holding a paper plate covered in aluminum foil, she walks through a labyrinthine subway station. She’s in Coney Island. She walks to the beach and, with her hands, eats wedding cake by the ocean.

I love this scene. It’s lovely but deeply ambivalent. Is the cake a reward, a consolation prize, or merely breakfast? To me, it demonstrates Hannah’s stubborn resilience. The previous night was terrible, but she has a treat and a new day, and, wearily but relentlessly, she claims both. Her appetite, for once, is not a burden or a curse. It affirms her: She is fat, and beautiful, and alive in a world determined to crush her spirit. Throughout the season, we’ve been offered this intense pressure between our loathing of Hannah and her loathing of herself; in this moment, with the cake, it’s hard to know if she’s helping or hurting herself, if this is a moment of celebration or defeat. I like that too. It’s as if Dunham has collapsed the distance between Hannah and the audience, suggesting that perhaps without all the context, when she has nothing in her hands except cake, we understand her enough to walk with her to the ocean.

Lately, Dunham seems optimistic again, albeit in a crone-era, no-fucks-left-to-give kind of way. It’s a good time for it; the past few years have seen a gradual shift in cultural opinion surrounding Dunham following her withdrawal from the limelight, with zoomers discovering—and millennials rediscovering—the gem that is Girls. After years of mockery, Dunham is being reassessed as a genius in her own right, and her new public posture suggests that she, too, is being kinder to herself. In recent appearances, she seems delightfully uninterested in feedback; her body, changed by illness and time, flounces in vivid colors and dynamic dresses. Tracking the evolution in her work from Girls to last year’s Too Much, in which Meg Stalter plays a version of Dunham trying to recover from a bad breakup in London, I was struck by how generously the camera depicts Stalter’s Jessica. The tension from Girls around Hannah’s body isn’t present, despite Stalter’s similar shape and size. There’s so much more freedom and movement in Jessica’s sense of herself than what Hannah could offer by the end of Girls.

I was struck, too, by what I found in Dunham’s new book, which has kick-started a fresh round of appreciation of her. Famesick is a memoir of the body. It’s about a female body spanning youth to middle age, using its challenges as the lens for the ongoing becoming of Lena Dunham. There’s the anxiety surrounding the intense exposure of Girls, the addiction that followed, then the reset of rehab. There’s the debilitating pain of endometriosis and the transformation of a surgical hysterectomy. There’s disordered eating and fatigue, weight and medication.

Reading Dunham’s words and witnessing her book tour—which has included hosting friends for events from an onstage bed, in a tableau that is part Victorian invalid and part slumber party—I feel inspired by her embrace, these days, of softness. As a millennial who, like Dunham, is turning 40 this year, it seems to go against every instinct I have to embrace my flawed, sensitive, vulnerable body, one that never quite does exactly what I want it to—not when I was in my 20s and full of hope and self-loathing, not now, maybe not ever. But then, this is the gift of Dunham’s endless offering of her own body’s story, from Girls to Famesick. I may still struggle to accept my own, but I can, after all these years, embrace hers.

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