Gen Z Made Me, a Millennial Mom, Rewatch This 2012 Show—and I'm So Glad They Did

It's amazing how in the pilot alone, the then 25-year-old Lena Dunham—showrunner, writer, director, star—nailed so much. Rewatching in a city far from my old Williamsburg haunts, it felt as if I were viewing a home movie. I could smell the Greenpoint air. From the jump, the show captured what being a young white person in north Brooklyn was like in the mid-aughts. This wasn't Carrie Bradshaw's New York. We were recession grads who couldn't afford Manhattan, but working in an art gallery a la Charlotte York was still a possibility. Dunham had the rare ability to see the forest for the trees, poking fun at hipster culture while depicting the truth of that particular moment in time. In a scene where Hannah Horvath, Dunham's character, is high on opiates procured from a legal flower shop (thanks, Ray), she implores her parents to continue to financially support her as she completes the next great American novel: “I don't want to freak you out, but I think that I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least, a voice of a generation,” she says. As I bicycle my 9-month-old's legs waiting for a call from the pediatrician regarding infant constipation, I think: "This is a perfect moment of comedy."

When it aired, the "voice of a generation" moment worked on two planes—as did the entire series. There was the Girls world, and then there was Lena Dunham's world, and they folded in on each other. For better or worse (I think we can safely say for worse, but that's a different story), Hannah was a reflection of Lena, who was a reflection of Hannah, and so on.

But now, Girls from my 2024 vantage point is even more dizzying. I'm looking back at the holy trinity that once consumed me: Lena, Hannah and myself. It's a strange knot that I'm having trouble untangling even now. Lena was Hannah and Hannah was Lena and I wanted to be Lena, but was, unfortunately, unpaid internships and all, more like Hannah.

See, unlike Hannah, Lena, one year older than me, was already wildly successful—Tiny Furniture was an indie hit that led to Judd Apatow that led to her rising star. Lena was part of a Brooklyn elite, friends with the right people and had a slate of future projects ready to go. Her actual presence—and Girls' presence—was so strong it was tangible in Williamsburg and Lower Manhattan. Sightings of Lena and cast around town were frequent. I even spotted her at bar once, and I saw the actor who played Ray on the L train about once a week. "See that building? Lena Dunham owns the whole floor," someone once said to me.

I was very broke and very stressed and as a young wannabe-some-kind-of-artist-writer in Brooklyn, of course I was jealous of Lena Dunham, which is why I experienced a certain schadenfreude to her backlash—she was the butt of the joke or subject of great derision for a looong time. Something happened with a dog, she over-shared (again), she got lite-cancelled a couple times and said sorry...a lot. I let the disproportional public backlash affect my own thoughts on this so-called "voice of my generation."

In April 2017, the last episode of Girls aired. A week later, I got married and turned 30. At the time, I thought the ending of the series felt like such a random coda: there was Hannah, struggling to breastfeed her baby in a small Upstate town...OK? Why? An almost-decade since, I realize how much I've thought about that final episode, trying to make sense of it and what it meant, for Hannah, for Lena, for Girls, for me.

It's weird to go back and watch a show that was such an astute reflection of a particular time and place. And revisiting that time and place made me realize that maybe Lena Dunham/Hannah Horvath wasn't the voice for everyone of her generation, but she was a voice for me. As I sit writing this—multitasking with a nurse on the phone who's telling me where to buy infant suppositories—I am very clearly no longer the version of myself that originally watched Girls. Lena Dunham is no longer the 25-year-old version of herself who created the show. But, despite her flaws, and the flaws that I see of myself in her, it's nice to see that Hannah is still Hannah, still a voice of a generation, perhaps the one right now, rediscovering the series.