Books

Lena Dunham's Debut Short Story Is Now Available!

by Caitlin White

Actress, screenwriter, producer, director, essayist, memoirist, and now short story writer — is there anything Lena can't do? Lena Dunham's first short story "Six Sausages" is now published and available to read in a special preview of Volume One of "Lenny," the upcoming newsletter created by Dunham and fellow Girls producer Jenni Konner. The entire issue will be dedicated to fiction, and "Six Sausages" will appear alongside an excerpt from Rebecca Dinerstein's debut June 2015 novel The Sunlit Night and an original story from the prolific writer and poet Jenny Zhang. Basically it's an embarrassment of riches for us modern feminists.

Dunham's "Six Sausages" centers on a college-aged woman who brings her sorta-kinda quasi-boyfriend (you know the type) home to visit her parents' house in New York City for the weekend. Check out an excerpt from the opening:

She picked him up at the airport at 9:30, just as the sun was setting, orange and blue above the hangars at JFK. She had cut and flat-ironed her own bangs, which were longer on the left side and came to a gothic point, and purchased a shapeless blue cotton dress at Old Navy. Despite her mother’s feet being as big as paddles, she always borrowed her shoes for important occasions and this was as important as anything, so she limped across the median towards the terminal doors. He came off the plane with a dazed look like a just-landed astronaut. She clapped her hands when she saw him, and then back-tracked to a shy wave.

If this sounds like an awfully familiar late-teen experience (I'm also raising my hand), then "Lenny" is living up to its mission statement. The tagline to Dunham and Konner's newsletter is "feminism, style, health, politics, friendship, and everything else," and in an interview with Buzzfeed, Dunham said:

[Lenny is for] an army of like-minded intellectually curious women and the people who love them, who want to bring change but also want to know, like, where to buy the best tube top for summer that isn’t going to cost your entire paycheck.

Jessica Grose, who has experience at Jezebel and Slate under her belt, has referred to "Lenny" as "Rookie's big sister," which I think is something we can all get behind. Especially if it's going to have more original work by Ms. Dunham herself.