Poor Antonoff! What he had to suffer to gain some questionable fame from this fat pig! Personally, I would not suffer someone eating in bed even for ONE WEEK, even if it was a hot model with millions of dollars and 150 IQ.
What she reveals about herself and their relationship is just not flattering to her
at all, but, comically, she doesn't even realize it
.
Dunham decorated the apartment to suit herself while Antonoff was off on tour, and when he returned and didn't like it, it was because he had (in her mind) boring taste:
And he hated it. He didn’t want to hate it. He tried not to hate it. But he didn’t like living among the insides of my mind. I thought I was giving him a gift, like the time I came home from summer camp and my mother had painted my walls four different chalky colors and installed a Friends poster, a candle shaped like a slice of honeydew melon, and an inflatable chair (all this for under $100 at Woolworth’s—RIP Woolworth’s). I wanted to give him the magic that she’d always given me by dreaming her maddening dreams. But he wanted a Restoration Hardware couch and a giant watch to hang on the wall. I felt sick every time I made a design concession or covered up pink with dove gray. Love can only survive so much.
"But he didn't like living among the insides of my mind." Yeah, Lena--because the insides of your mind were apparently so all-consuming, they left
no space for him. That making "design concessions" in a shared living space (which I suspect he put up most of the money for, since you're the one who had to go) made you feel "sick," and that you're still framing him as an ungrateful recipient of your "gift," who was too mundane to see the "magic" in it? Yeah, that's Narcissim for you.
I am intrigued by her dad calling her a grifter. Sounds like she was being huge parasite and trying to attach to someone to take care of her. Like a giant tick who had to be removed, squished and set afire to ensure it is gone forever.
The saga of her time after moving out of the place she lived in with Antonoff is...interesting:
...I made a massive real-estate mistake, the kind that nightmares are made of. I bought something in a state of panic, feeling like if I didn’t put down roots soon I’d float away. I never even moved in, and magazines wrote about it when I sold it at a loss. I was real-estate shamed. “You really are my daughter,” my mother said.
I stayed on an inflatable mattress on Matt and Carl’s living room floor in a co-op built for garment workers on the Lower East side that now houses video artists and academics. I got to know Sheila, the woman at the gate who received packages. I slept in my father’s office between two filing cabinets and used a box of printer paper as my nightstand, letting Friday night on Sixth Avenue lull me to sleep. I spent a few ill-fated weeks in a hotel with the elderly three-legged Yorkie I was fostering and gained 12 pounds in room service while the dog snored in a pile of dirty laundry. Finally, when my father called me a grifter, enough was enough.
While crashing on her friends' (gentrified) floor because she didn't want to move into the apartment she'd just bought out of fear of "floating away," she actually got to know the woman at the gate who receives packages! How fucking big of you, Lena. What a woman of the people. Now maybe you can actually talk to the maintenance guys in your current building to find out if they're twins or not! (But let's not rush things.)
I can't comprehend why one would buy an apartment, only to never move in and sell it at a loss. Making a bad real estate decision because there's a sense of urgency, and you've got to buy something NOW? Yeah, I can understand that, having done it. But in that case, you live with your mistake and make the best of it. You don't impose on your friends, or sleep in your dad's office, or stay in hotels and getting fat on room service. YOU HAVE AN APARTMENT. GO THERE (even if it sucks, which I doubt this one actually did).
I think the reason she did all of that, however, is because she couldn't cope with being alone, with nobody to pay attention to her. In her own apartment, there would have been nobody to hear her talk about herself. When her father called her a "grifter," he was right, but it wasn't so much the physical space she was using, but her emotional wallowing she was getting others to indulge.
She sounds extremely insufferable and pretentious.
She IS extremely insufferable and pretentious. My mother has a phrase that describes people like this: "She sucks all the air out of the room," and that phrase echoes in my mind every time I read anything Dunham has written about herself.
Lol. They’ve been trying to bring back the awful early 80’s Memphis style for like fifteen years. No surprise Lena fell for it in a desperate bid to look cool.
(Past styles tend to be rediscovered and celebrated about forty years after their peak. So we’ve had major revivals for arts & Crafts, Art Deco and then mid-century modern. We’ve basically stopped at mid century modern for a long time because the few styles after it are pretty hideous, Memphis being exhibit A. They’ve tried pushing Memphis shit in the interior design world for over a decade now but people aren’t interested because it’s mostly a terribly hodgepodge of eyesores, whereas Art Deco and mid century modern are well designed and gorgeous.
Lena’s interior designer finally found a sucker that would buy up a lot of the puffy 80’s furniture and Memphis shit that’s been collecting dust in showrooms. Memphis is the ultimate weird for weirdness sake so it’s perfect for Lena.)
The breadth of Lena’s terrible taste in absolutely everything is truly amazing.
She hasn't fallen for the absolute worst Memphis shit, which even in the '80s was considered ridiculous (the people I knew who actually bought it did so because it was silly and quirky, but none of them planned to keep it around forever because it's the furniture equivalent of telling the same joke over and over again--no matter how funny it originally was, the joke gets old really fast).
But the Sottsass mirror, and that dining table that is a bad '80s throwback to real Art Deco? It's bad enough. ETA: And I'm not sure that coffee table with the gross, bulbous legs is from one of the Memphis designers, but it reminds me of a lot of ugly shit from the late '80s, and I'm surprised she doesn't have one of those tall, urn-shaped, white plaster floor lamps to complement it.
The rest of the apartment, on closer examination, looks like it was furnished from West Elm (the dresser with agate handles is from there) and weekend flea-market finds, which makes her complaint that Antonoff wanted "a Restoration Hardware couch" seem even more ridiculous.
