Over the past year, the 26-year-old director/writer/actor, daughter of two New York artists, has been a lightning rod for praise and controversy. Her graphic, warts-and-all HBO show about 20-somethings in New York premiered last spring after much advance buzz, then received a flurry of criticism for being too whiny, too self-centered, too nepotistic, too white and in the most cutting attacks too naked.
Dunham, possessed of a seemingly Teflon self-image, powered on, selling a book of essays and advice for a reported $3.7 million in her downtime from the show and tweaking the media’s obsession with her normal-girl looks by hitting a press line in an outfit that seemed pantsless (it had barely visible short shorts).
“Get used to it,” she told Page Six, “because I’m going to live to be 100, and I am going to show my thighs every day till I die.” She also appeared naked in an opening skit at the Emmys, stuffing her face with cake while crouching in a bathroom stall.
Just the other day, Howard Stern made a characteristically juvenile dig about Dunham, complaining that she “looks like Jonah Hill and keeps taking her clothes off,” then finishing it up with “Congratulations to her, it’s so hard for little fat girls to get anything going these days.”
Dunham laughed it off with David Letterman, no less saying she was a fan of Stern and she’d like to put that motto on her tombstone: “She was a little fat chick and she got it going.”
Here’s what she is not: boringly nice. In her second acceptance speech at the Globes, Dunham thanked Chad Lowe a shout-out to his notorious snub at the Oscars in 2000. Why did she do it? “Because Hilary Swank forgot, and because I’m an a- -hole,” she told the press backstage.
Like that other child of New York, Eloise whose image wallpapers Dunham’s Twitter feed she’s got such a quick wit she can’t help being a little bratty now and then. And like her mentor and series producer Judd Apatow, she’s taking awkward all the way to the bank.
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