The Lena Dunham Backlash

Funniest thing I read today from Heather Wilhelm at Real Clear Politics: 

Over the past few years, Dunham has been vexingly omnipresent:  cheerfully cruising the red carpet for her eight Emmy nominations, clasping Golden Globe awards with a crazed look in her eyes, pocketing a $3.6 million book advance, hosting a particularly sanctimonious episode of “Saturday Night Live,” hijacking the cover of Vogue, and earning approximately 10,365 media stories per day. I don’t want to scare you, but she could be hiding in your closet right now.

So when her book, “Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s ‘Learned,’” hit stores this week, somewhere, back in the primitive reaches of my brain, one endlessly optimistic neuron fired a valiant message, over and over: “Oh, whatever. Who on earth would buy this book? People have things like Halloween and Ebola to worry about!”

Well, blow me down, and, apparently, don’t take my stock market advice. As of Tuesday night, “Not That Kind of Girl”—which, it should be noted, is authored by a young woman who recently got a bowl cut exactly like Jim Carrey’s in “Dumb and Dumber,” on purpose, and then posed naked, towel-wrapped, chewing a birth control pill packet for a Planned Parenthood e-mail enthusiastically comparing voting to doing Ecstasy—hit No. 2 on Amazon. Yes, this is actually happening. Let’s discuss, if only to combat a creeping sense of quiet existential despair.

For the record, I tweeted that we had reached Peak Dunham a few weeks ago.