Week 6: Memoirs

I really felt that I could relate to Lena Dunham after reading Growing Up in Therapy. I've never seen a therapist; however, I know what it's like to have anxiety and be afraid of everything. My mother is a worrier, and unfortunately, I inherited that personality trait from her. In the second paragraph when she talks about her assistant teacher coming into school with a cold sore, she's convinced its MRSA,  I swear, that could have been a page ripped out from the diary of my own life. When her father went for a walk for a few hours, Lena said, "While he's gone, I start to plan my life without him". When I was younger and my parents would fight, I would lock myself in my room and cry, and convince myself that my parents were getting a divorce. I still worry about everything: my fiance getting locked in someone's basement when he buys golf clubs from a guy on Facebook Marketplace, that I will die in a fiery car crash every time I'm on the freeway, and when someone doesn't text me back within an hour, I think that they are mad at me.

I felt a connection to Dunham when I read Growing Up in Therapy, but I didn't feel that when I read the very short story Cousins. If we were given more context into the relationship, I would have been able to relate, because I too have had fights with friends that ended abruptly and I wasn't sure why. Had the writer gone into depth about how the two had gotten close and how their relationship had been over the years I would have felt more connected to the story.

Lena Dunham, in my opinion, did not overshare in her Growing Up in Therapy story. She started out by explaining the thoughts that went through her mind and as a reader I could put the pieces together to understand the obsessive compulsive disorder that she has. Dunham listed out the things that kept her awake at night, and things that she worried about daily. Nothing I felt was overshared; however, many people probably would feel that it was, but that was sort of the point of the story. She needed to highlight the anxieties and worries that she had as a child, and well into her young adulthood for us to understand her, and many people who have the same disorder.

Although I'm sure a little bit of Dunham's story was dramatized, I felt that it fit in with her voice well. The things that she experienced were what most people probably think about and can relate with, so having a writer spell out the things they went through humorously helps readers relate more. In my opinion, Lena was telling the truth in her story; however, with the Cousins short story, I didn't feel the truth because I didn't get the whole story.