In her new book, Not That Kind of Girl, Lena Dunham tells her most personal love story.
I was an only child until I turned six. I figured, knowing what little I did about reproduction and family planning, that this was how it was always going to be. I had heard the kids at preschool discussing their siblings or lack thereof:
"My mommy can't have another baby."
"My daddy says I'm just enough."
"Do you have brothers or sisters?" my teachers asked me on the first day of preschool.
"No," I replied. "But my mommy is pregnant with a baby."
She wasn't pregnant with a baby, not even a tiny bit, and had to explain as much when the teacher promptly congratulated her on the "coming addition."
"Do you want a brother or sister?" my mother asked me that night as we ate take-out Chinese off the coffee table. "Is that why you lied?"
"Sure," I responded, as casually as if she'd offered me an extra moo shu pancake.
So unbeknownst to me, my vote tipped the scales, and they began to try in earnest. And two years later, on a boiling day in June, my mother turned toward me from the driver's seat of our Volvo and said, "Guess what? You're going to have a baby sister."
"No, I'm not," I replied.
"Yes, you are," she said, smiling wide. "Just like you wanted."
"Oh," I told her. "I changed my mind."
Grace came late in January, on a school night no less. My mother's water broke, splashing the hardwood in front of the elevator of our New York City apartment building, after which she waddled back to my bedroom and put me to sleep. When I woke up at 3:00 A.M., the house was dark, save for a light glowing from my parents' bedroom. I crept down the hall, where I found a babysitter named Belinda reading on their bed.
In the morning I was walked down Broadway to the hospital, where Grace was the only Caucasian infant in a nursery of Chinese babies. I peered through the glass: "Which one is she?" I asked.
My mother lay in a hospital bed. Her belly still looked as full as it had the day before but soft now, like a Jell-O mold. I tried not to stare at her reddened breasts hanging from her kimono. She was tired and pale, but she watched me expectantly as I sat in a chair and my father placed the baby carefully in my lap. Grace was long, with a flat red face and a bulbous, flaky skull. She was limp and helpless, flexing and unfurling her minuscule fist. I found my doll significantly cuter. He held up the Polaroid camera, and I raised Grace like I would the prize rabbit at a 4-H fair.
I spent Grace's first night at home wailing, "INTRUDER! RETURN HER!" until I exhausted myself and fell asleep in an armchair. The feeling was so sharp, so distinctly tragic, that I have never forgotten it, even though I have never felt it again. Maybe it's the sensation of finding a lover in your spouse's bed. Maybe it's more like getting fired from the job you've had for 30 years. Maybe it's just the feeling of losing what is yours.
From the beginning there was something unknowable about Grace. Self-possessed, opaque, she didn't cry like a typical baby or make her needs clear. She wasn't particularly cuddly, and when you hugged her (at least when I hugged her), she would wriggle to get free like a skittish cat. Once, when she was around two, she fell asleep on me in a hammock, and I sat as still as I could, desperate not to wake her. I nuzzled her downy hair, kissed her chubby cheek, ran my pointer finger along her thick eyebrow. When she finally awoke, it was with a jolt, as if she had fallen asleep on a stranger on the subway.
Grace's playpen sat in the middle of the living room, between the couch and the dining room table I had carved my name into. We conducted our lives around her, my parents talking on twin telephones, me drawing pictures of "fashion girls" and "crazy men." Occasionally I would kneel on the floor in front of her, stick my face into the mesh of her enclosure, and coo, "Hiii, Graaacie." Once she leaned in and placed her lips on my nose. I could feel them, hard and thin, through the barrier. "Mom, she kissed me! Look, she kissed me!" I leaned in again, and she bit down hard on my nose with her two new teeth and laughed.
As she grew, I took to bribing her time and affection: one dollar in quarters if I could do her makeup like a "motorcycle chick." Three pieces of candy if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds. Whatever she wanted to watch on TV if she would just "relax on me." Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl, I was trying. Maybe, I thought, she would be more willing to accept kisses if I wore the face mask my grandmother had for when she did her dialysis. (The answer was no.) What I really wanted, beyond affection, was to feel that she needed me, that she was helpless without her big sister leading her through the world. I took a perverse pleasure in delivering bad news to her—the death of our grandfather, a fire across the street—hoping that her fear would drive her into my arms, would make her trust me.
"If you don't try so hard, it'll be better," my father said. So I hung back. But once she was sleeping, I would creep into her room and listen to her breathe: in, out, in, out, in again, until she rolled away.
Grace always intrigued adults. For starters, she was smart. Her interests ranged from architecture to ornithology, and she approached things much more like an adult than with the irksome whimsy of a precocious child. As a little girl I had been obnoxiously self-aware, irritatingly smug, prone to reading the dictionary "for fun" and making pronouncements like, "Papa, nobody my age enjoys real literature." Things I'd heard "special" people say in movies. Grace simply existed, full of wisdom and wonder, which is why we often found her in the bathroom at a restaurant, talking a 40-year-old woman through a breakup or asking what a cigarette tasted like. One day we found her in our pantry swigging from a small bottle of airplane vodka, disgusted but intrigued.
On only one occasion did her maturity go too far. It was the dawn of social media, and Grace, then in fifth grade, asked me to make her a Friendster account. Together we listed her interests (science, Mongolia, rock 'n' roll) and what she was looking for (friends) and uploaded a blurry picture of her blowing a kiss at the camera, clad in a neon one-piece.
One night I picked up my computer, and it was open to Grace's Friendster messages. There were a dozen or so, all from a guy named Kent: "If you love Rem Koolhaas, we should definitely meet up."
Always the alarmist, I woke up my mother, who confronted Grace about it over whole-wheat pancakes the next morning. Livid, Grace refused to speak to me for several days. She didn't care whether I was trying to protect her, or what "Kent" the "ad-sales rep" had in mind. All that mattered was that I had told her secret.
In college my dorm mate Jessica started dating a girl. To me it seemed sudden and rash, a response to trendy political correctness rather than basic human desire. "She broke up with her boyfriend like two weeks ago!" I told people. "All she cares about are shoes and dresses."
Her girlfriend, a pretty-faced soft butch with round glasses and hunk-at-the-sock-hop hair, had graduated already and would drive to Oberlin, Ohio, every other weekend, at which point I would have to clear out, sleeping on the floor of someone else's room, so they could go down on each other for infinity.
Grace came to visit me at school one weekend, and I brought her to a party. By this time she was 15, all legs and eyes and fawn-colored freckles, with shiny brown hair that fell down her back and $200 jeans she had somehow convinced my father she needed. She stood in the corner, laughing and nursing the single beer I had promised her.
Oberlin College being a liberal haven where opposition was king, the coolest clique at school was a group of rugby-playing, neon-wearing lesbians. They dominated every party with their Kate Bush-heavy mixtapes, abstract face paint, and pansexual energy. "Kissing is a dance move," their leader, Daphne, once explained to me.
And that night Daphne noticed Grace, her little puppy nose and the big, ridged teeth she still hadn't grown into, and dragged her onto the dance floor.
"We're alive!" she shouted, and Grace was embarrassed, but she danced. Awkwardly at first, then with conviction, engaged but not overly eager. I watched her from the sofa with pride. That's my girl. She can roll with anything.
"Your sister's gay," Jessica announced the next day, folding the fresh laundry spread across her twin bed.
"Excuse me?" I asked.
"I'm just saying, she's into girls," she said casually like she was offering me a helpful tip on how to save money on car insurance.
And I completely lost it: "No, she's not! Just because you're gay for a second doesn't mean everyone else is too, OK!? And not that I'd care if she was, but if she was, I would know. I'm her sister, OK? I'd know. I know everything."
__ NEXT: Grace, all grown-up »__
Grace came out to me when she was 17. We were sitting at the dining room table eating pad thai, our parents out of town as they often were now that we were old enough to fend for ourselves. Twenty-three and sponging mightily, I forked some noodles into my mouth as Grace described a terrible date with a "dorky" boy from an uptown school.
"He's too tall," she moaned. "And nice. And he was trying too hard to be witty. He put a napkin on his hand and said, 'Look, I have a hand cape.'" She paused. "And he draws cartoons. And he has diabetes."
"He sounds awesome!" I said. And then, before I considered it: "What are you, gay?"
"Actually, yes," she said, with a laugh, maintaining the composure that has been her trademark since birth.
I began to sob. Not because I didn't want her to be gay—in truth, it worked perfectly with my embarrassing image of myself as the quirkiest girl on the block. No, I was crying because I was suddenly flooded with an understanding of how little I really knew about her pains, her secrets, the fantasies that played in her head when she lay in bed at night. Her inner life.
She had always felt opaque to me, a beautiful unibrowed mystery just beyond our family's grasp. I had been telling my parents, sister, grandma—anyone who would listen, really—about my desires from an early age. I live in a world that is almost compulsively free of secrets.
When Grace was three, she came home from preschool and announced she was in love with a girl. "Her name is Madison Lane," she said. "And we're going to get married."
"You can't," I said. "Because she's a girl."
Grace shrugged. "Well, we are."
Later, this became a favorite family story: the year Grace was gay, the Madison Lane incident. She laughed, as if we were telling any silly baby story. We laughed like it was a joke.
But it wasn't a joke. And Grace's admission felt not like a revelation but a confirmation of something we all understood but refused to say.
Throughout high school Grace had remained above the fray. She was president of speech and debate, attending a rhetoric match, then running off to tennis lessons in a crisp white skirt, skeptical of the hormonal hysteria that had overtaken her girlfriends. She's too mature, we thought, too unusual to get caught up in crushes. We said, "College will be her time. For satisfaction, for relaxation, for boys."
Grace was polite, firm, and unemotional as she answered my questions, continuing to eat her pad thai steadily and check her phone every few minutes.
The basics: When did you know? Are you scared? Do you like someone? Then the ones I couldn't ask: What have I ever said that let you down, that failed you or made you feel alone? Who did you tell before you told me? Is this my fault because of the dialysis mask?
She said she'd already had a romance, a girl named June who was her roommate on a summer program in Florence. They kissed most nights and, she said, they "never really talked about it." I tried to imagine June, but all I could picture was a snowy-white mannequin in a wig.
My discomfort with secrets made waiting for Grace to come out to my parents torturous. I begged her to tell them, saying it was for her sake but knowing it was for my own. Sitting with the knowledge, the divide it created in our home, was too much for me. I had never been comfortable with what was not said, and there was nothing I would not say. But Grace wasn't ready, despite my cajoling and kicking her under the dinner table. I held my tongue, despite my fear that I would have a Tourette's moment and shout, *"Grace is gay!"*One morning my mother emerged from her bedroom, eyes sunken, hair askew, bathrobe still on. "I didn't sleep at all," she said wearily. "Grace has a secret, I know it."
I gulped. "What do you think it is?"
"She stays late after school, she ignores me when I ask her questions about her day. She seems distracted. I think"—she took a pained sip of her coffee—"I think she's having an affair with her Latin teacher."
"Mom, no," I said.
"Well, how else do you explain it?"
"Just think," I hissed. "Think." I waited, though not long enough, for her to understand. "Grace is gay!"
She cried harder than I had, like a surprised child. Or like a mother who had gotten something wrong.
A few years after she came out, Grace admitted that the June encounters were a fiction. She had invented them as a means of proving to anyone who questioned her that she was really gay. I was relieved to learn she hadn't fallen in love without telling me.
Grace is graduating from college. The four years since she left home have lessened her mystery and deepened her sense of self. She's emerged as a surprising, strange adult, still prone to bouts of moody distance but also possessed of a high cackle and a desire to have constant and aggressive fun. Sometimes she hugs and tickles me, and her long cold fingers annoy me, a reversal of fortune I never imagined possible. When she writes, which isn't often, I get insanely jealous of the way her mind works, the fact that she seems to create for her own pleasure and not to make herself known.
She dresses like a Hawaiian criminal—loose, patterned shirts and oddly fitting suits, loafers without socks. Her attitude toward sex is more modern than mine and has a radical element I chased but never found. She wakes up with her hair knotted and leaves the house like that, often not returning home until late. She has a taste for unusual women, with strong noses and doll eyes and creative dispositions. She has a strong sense of social justice and an eye for anachronisms and contradictions. She is thin but physically lazy. Guys love her.
Lena Dunham is the creator, writer, and star of HBO's Girls and author of Not That Kind of Girl, from which this is excerpted.
Want more? Read our exclusive interview with Lena Dunham about what she's learned from her sister, love, and the key to a happy relationship.
