How It Was for Lena’s Mom

Okay so I fell down a Lena Dunham family rabbit hole and read this interview with her mama Laurie Simmons from 2010, right as Tiny Furniture was taking off. You know that scene in the movie where she finds her mom’s journals? (There’s a scene in the movie where she finds her mom’s journals.) The interviewer asked Laurie about that, and she was like, yeah, that part was real, she totally found my journal. BUT HERE IS WHAT IS COOL: “The parts of my journal that she didn’t read, because they’re more boring, is that, on every other page, I was going on about how I was going to pay my ConEd and how I was going to pay my rent. That was the complete and utter focus of my life: How am I going to pay for my rent and make work? And that’s every artist’s dilemma — or at least every artist that I knew.”

Then she says that it’s so dope that Lena doesn’t have to do that. Or didn’t back then. Maybe she worries about paying her ConEd bill now, I don’t know her life. (“So for me the idea that Lena could find living at home bearable and raise the money to make this movie and make this movie at 24 — it’s incredible.”)

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