Lena Dunham Publishes Surprise Book of Diary Entries
Lena Dunham has published a new book, Is It Evil Not to Be Sure?, a collection of the writer/director/actor’s diary entries from the mid-2000s that will be benefit the nonprofit Girls Write Now.
Dunham said she rediscovered her journals while poking around an old hard drive as she recovered from surgery, she told Buzzfeed. The book compiles entries from fall 2005 to spring 2006 — around what would have been Dunham’s 20th birthday — and re-reading the diary filled her with “the kind of mortification that is part and parcel with meeting a former version of yourself.”
“I was also moved by — maybe even proud of — how carefully I had recorded that period of time, my younger self’s commitment to capturing the kinds of hyper-internal formative moments so often lost to adulthood. I have always believed that women chronicling their own lives, even (or especially) at their most mundane, is a radical act.”
Is It Evil Not to Be Sure? is available as an ebook, though a first edition printing, limited to 2,000 copies, will be on sale today, May 17th, via Dunham’s Lenny Letter at 12 p.m. ET.
All profits from Is It Evil Not to Be Sure? will benefit Girls Write Now, a nonprofit dedicated to mentoring young women and pairing them with professional women writers for workshops, college prep, portfolio building, publishing and digital media.
Dunham’s HBO series Girls wrapped its fifth, and penultimate, season last month. Its final season is expected to arrive next year. “I conceived of Girls when I was 23, and now I’m nearly 30 — the show has quite perfectly spanned my twenties, the period of time that it’s about, and so it feels like the right time to wrap our story up,” Dunham said.